Estimating Passenger Origin-Destination Matrix of Fixed-Fare Bus Routes with Smart Card Usage Information

The automatic fare collection system for buses has been more and more popular in China and around the world. The convenience of such systems has attracted a lot of frequent users. For example, the percent of bus passengers holding smart cards is almost 65% in the city of Jinan, China by the end of 2009. The log of payment activities is a rich source for transit planners’ decision support. However, the most important information, Origin-Destination (OD) matrix of passenger demands of each bus route, cannot be easily determined because only boarding information is recorded on buses with fixed fares. This paper mainly focuses on providing an improved approach for estimating the passenger demand OD matrix for each bus route. First, a necessary data filtering technique is applied to process the smart card data. Then, the OD matrix of a passenger trip is obtained by considering the connectivity and walking distance of individual transfer. Finally, the passenger OD matrix for each bus route is estimated individually. Experiments were carried out with smart card data collected in Jinan, China on July 7, 2009. Results showed that the proposed approach provided a success rate of 75% in average for route OD matrix estimation, while reaching 85% in peak hours. The computed OD matrix is valuable to support trip demand estimation, bus dispatching and route optimization for planners and decision-makers.