Impact of Carriage Crowding Level on Bus Dwell Time: Modelling and Analysis

This paper develops two types of estimation models to quantify the impacts of carriage crowding level on bus dwell time. The first model (model I) takes the crowding level and the number of alighting and boarding passengers into consideration and estimates the alighting time and boarding time, respectively. The second model (model II) adopts almost the same regression method, except that the impact of crowding on dwell time is neglected. The analysis was conducted along two major bus routes in Harbin, China, by collecting 640 groups of dwell times under crowded condition manually. Compared with model II, the mean absolute error (MAE) of model I is reduced by 137.51%, which indicates that the accuracy of bus dwell time estimation could be highly improved by introducing carriage crowding level into the model. Meanwhile, the MAE of model I is about 3.9 seconds, which is acceptable in travel time estimation and bus schedule.