Evaluating Public Transportation Service in a Transit Hub based on Passengers Energy Cost

Public transport system needs to serve passengers continuously, accurately and effectively. Service quality in public transportation has been widely researched since it can evaluate public transportation systems within the passengers' aspect. At present, however, the study of public transport system service quality is usually based on survey, which requires a lot of time and economic cost. Besides, the result is insufficient in some cases since few passengers take the survey. Commuter traffic in peak hours is always a hot topic in public transport research. Based on field experiments, this paper proposes an evaluation method for public transportation service quality based on the energy cost of passengers. This method utilizes the heart rate, acceleration and speed data automatically collected by the experimenters when they are walking in subway transfer stations, fits these data to Physical Activity Intensity and uses it as the index of travel energy cost. Subsequently, the accuracy, theoretical and practical prospect of this method are verified by the transfer passenger data of Beijing Subway Line 1 and Line 2 in May, 2017. The results show that the service quality evaluation method can accurately perceive the change of system service efficiency and its recovery ability according to different travel demands of the passengers. At the same time, this method uses automatic data collection to analyze, improves its accuracy and analysis adaptability compared with the traditional methods.