Using Minimum Travel Time to Determine Factors Influencing Travel Time Discrepancy and Variability in Tram Transit

Abstract

Quality of service in urban surface transit has a great impact on sustainable urban mobility, with travel time being one of the most important indicators of service reliability. But urban surface transit is prone to many disturbance factors causing travel time discrepancy and variability, making transit less reliable for passengers. We conducted research in the City of Zagreb on a single tram line by splitting it into constant-frequency segments. The first phase was modeling minimum segment travel times to base the indicators and predictors upon, and the second phase was establishing correlation matrices between the predictors and travel time using Pearson correlation coefficients and significance. Variance inflation factors were used to check for collinearities. While predictors belonging to the transport supply irregularity group did not have an impact, the ones belonging to the disturbance factors group showed correlation, with six of them being significant. This research in rarely represented tram transit determined the most significant disturbance factors rich in traffic context that can be used to develop travel time prediction models.

Keywords

• disturbance factor
• minimum travel time
• service reliability
• travel time discrepancy
• travel time variability
• urban surface transit