MEASUREMENT OF THE PERFORMANCE OF BUS SERVICES

A study has been made of methods of assessing the performance of bus services from the passengers' point of view. In the light of the results of surveys of passengers' attitudes to the performance of bus services, reliability was chosen as the attribute most likely to reflect their views. Accordingly, three 'unreliability measures' are examined in detail. These relate to average waiting time; excessively long waits; and excessively long in-vehicle journey times. The unreliability measures are designed for use on a route-by-route basis and care has been taken in their definition to ensure that they can be applied to services of both short and long scheduled headways and to journeys of different lengths. With the increasing use of automatic vehicle-location systems and selective vehicle detection equipment for bus priorities, there is scope for introducing automatic reliability monitoring along the lines proposed in this report. The potential for the use of such equipment for this purpose is discussed.