Developing a System for Measuring Transportation Performance and Information Distribution of Urban Bus using Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI)

Planning and operation improvement of urban bus systems are closely tied to the ability to measure the spatial and temporal performance of it. Since the subject of urban bus system is public, paying attention to their needs and expectation plays a vital role in its performance success, also encourage them to use bus service. The main challenge of public participation in measuring performance of public transportation is the lack of an integrated infrastructure and subsequent inability to collect adequate and timely data. Recent promotions in Web2.0, social networks and location-aware technologies such as the global positioning system, mobile-phone tracking, and Wi-Fi positioning system create new forms of the geo-collaboration for public. Volunteer geographic information (VGI) can be easily and quickly produced and shared in a dynamic, interactive, multimedia and distributed environment by users of different knowledge levels. Noting that urban bus system is considered as one of the most frequent modes of public transportation, in this paper a system is developed by using the advantages of Web2.0 technology, volunteer geographic information and geo-tagging based on three-tire architecture to facilitate public participation in bus performance measurement. The system provides useful and updated information about bus lines, positions of stations and time-table schedules. Moreover, such a system is capable to collect different data types including quantitative, qualitative, spatial, and multi-media by stakeholders (current and potential passengers, professionals and employees) in any space and time consuming less time and cost. Then, by utilizing TOPSIS method, the performance of each line is calculated. The final result is presented using geo-visualization technique and Google­map­API. In this paper five bus lines in Tehran Municipality Region 4, are examined. Results of performance evaluation showed that Shahrak – e -Pars– Resalat­ Square has the highest performance rate.