Assessing the running times of bus services has traditionally been a difficult and expensive task for the majority of bus operators in Australia, and in other parts of the world. Passive Global Positioning System (GPS) technology offers a low-cost means of collecting large amounts of highly accurate data, which can be used in an on-going performance assessment program. This paper provides an overview of a number of software applications developed for processing and analysing large GPS data records collected by a bus operator in Sydney in late 2002/early 2003. The data collection process is described, and some examples are presented of output produced by the main trip processing and timetable query program. It is concluded that passive GPS is a highly attractive method of collecting data on performance, even for very small operators (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E210413.
Samenvatting