| City: | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Organization: | University of Toronto, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, Transportation Research Institute |
| Project Start Date: | 25 January 2016 |
| Project End Date: | 31 January 2016 |
| Reference: | Nguyen, P., Diab, E., Shalaby, A. (2017, July), "Understanding the Factors that Influence the Probability and Time to Streetcar Bunching Incidents", In iCity Research Papers: Theme Two, Project 2.3 Transit Management. https://uttri.utoronto.ca/files/2017/10/WP17-02-03-01-Understanding-the-factors.pdf |
| Problem: | Toronto's extensive streetcar network moves many people but suffers from bunching (consecutive vehicles arrive together rather than at scheduled time). This leads to inefficient service for the operator (TTC) and dissatisfactory service for customers. Understanding the factors that influence whether streetcar bunching occurs, and those that impact the time until bunching occurs, can help in the planning and operational stages to improve service. |
| Technical Solution: | Binary logistic regression on variables such as route #, trip direction, leading/following vehicle combination, time period, traffic volume, etc. Accelerated failure time analysis done to look at time until bunching given bunching occurred. |
| Datasets Used: | Automated Vehicle Location data, updated every 20s, from TTC in Jan 2016 |
| Outcome: | Pre Solution Performance: streetcar network has 25% of routes bunched, with some routes as high as 39% of trips bunched.
Post Solution Performance: found bunching significantly impacted by Route # (ROW characteristics, length, average stopping distance all captured), time of day, leading-following vehicle pair combination, scheduled headway, and actual headway. Further, found time until bunching impacted by above and traffic volume, # of transit signal prioritized intersections, and # of signalized intersections. |
| Issues that arose: | Limited info on passenger volumes. 502 & 503 routes operating as buses. No consideration of parking for traffic volumes. |
| Status: | Terminated |
| Entered by: | 28 September 2019 by Kevin Rupasinghe (kevin.rupasinghe@mail.utoronto.ca) |