Perspectives on stability and mobility of transit passenger's travel behaviour through smart card data

TL;DR

This study introduces a new metric and an improved clustering algorithm to analyze long-term stability and mobility patterns of transit riders using smart card data, revealing insights into their travel behavior over four years.

Contribution

It proposes a novel similarity metric and an enhanced clustering method (SS-OPTICS) for analyzing long-term transit rider behavior and categorizing travel pattern changes.

Findings

Long-term travel patterns show significant stability and mobility.

Clusters can be categorized by regularity and occasionality.

Socioeconomic factors influence transit behavior changes.

Abstract

Existing studies have extensively used spatiotemporal data to discover the mobility patterns of various types of travellers. Smart card data (SCD) collected by the automated fare collection systems can reflect a general view of the mobility pattern of public transit riders. Mobility patterns of transit riders are temporally and spatially dynamic, and therefore difficult to measure. However, few existing studies measure both the mobility and stability of transit riders' travel patterns over a long period of time. To analyse the long-term changes of transit riders' travel behaviour, the authors define a metric for measuring the similarity between SCD, in this study. Also an improved density-based clustering algorithm, simplified smoothed ordering points to identify the clustering structure (SS-OPTICS), to identify transit rider clusters is proposed. Compared to the original OPTICS, SS-OPTICS needs fewer parameters and has better generalisation ability. Further, the generated clusters are categorized according to their features of regularity and occasionality. Based on the generated clusters and categories, fine- and coarse-grained travel pattern transitions of transit riders over four years from 2010 to 2014 are measured. By combining socioeconomic data of Beijing in the year of 2010 and 2014, the interdependence between stability and mobility of transit riders' travel behaviour is also discussed.