Exploring Measures to Monitor Passenger-Centric Punctuality in Public Transport: A Pre-study.

An important quality aspect of public transport (PT) is its punctuality which can enhance the quality of passenger experiences, user satisfaction and hence the overall attractiveness of the PT system. To monitor and improve punctuality in such systems, one should be able to effectively measure it. Traditionally, measures/metrics of punctuality have been mainly focused on vehicle arrivals. While such measures allow (partly) monitoring the vehicles’ punctuality from an operator’s perspective, they ignore much of the passengers’ perspective, e.g., (off-)peak travel demand, and passengers’ values of travel time. Moreover, passenger-centric punctuality fits better to the experience of passengers in the system and hence to the overall PT passenger satisfaction. Thus, monitoring such punctuality can provide more accurate insights, e.g., on how to improve PT’s reliability and performance.

This project is a pre-study that aims to explore alternative approaches for monitoring punctuality in PT. The focus is on reviewing alternative passenger-centric metrics and evaluating their feasibility, challenges, and potential. The goal is to lay the groundwork for future research and practices to improve the quality of PT’s punctuality monitoring from the passengers' viewpoint.