BusViz: Big Data for Bus Fleets

Abstract

Transit agencies in major cities make hundreds of decisions every day on how to best allocate scarce resources. How adequate and reliable is service on a given bus route? When should capacity be added to a popular route? How should a bus route serve a neighborhood? Transit planners make decisions by using whatever information is available. This information includes ground surveys, public feedback, and a large element of experience and intuition. This paper presents BusViz, a web-based application that helps bus service operators and transit regulators to make better decisions by using large streams of field data to monitor and visualize the performance of bus fleets. The paper describes the system architecture and user interface of the application and illustrates how the Singapore Land Transport Authority is using it to iterate and evaluate ideas with data-driven rigor and to share quality of service statistics with various stakeholders.