Extracting Bus Transit Boarding and Alighting Information Using Smart Card Transaction Data

The smart card-based automated fare collection (AFC) technologies provide new opportunities for transportation data collection since smart card data (SCD) contain a significant amount of archived information that can be gathered and leveraged to help estimate public transit origin-destination (OD) matrices. Both boarding and alighting location detection are important particularly when there is no automatic vehicle location (AVL) system or other information in the database. With the analysis of raw data using limited information in this paper, an algorithm for boarding stop identification is presented after the trip direction and boarding cluster identification. Alighting stops are then identified based on the relationship between records. Finally, the feasibility and practicality of the methodology are tested using the bus transit SCD collected in Guangzhou, China.