A phone app might encourage more people to take buses

A phone app might encourage more people to take buses

December 5, 2014

A cellphone app that shows how far away before the next bus will actually arrive might encourage more people to ride buses.

Civil engineering students Akshay Kumar and Kayne Robinson carried out their final year research project, supervised by Professor Alan Nicholson, looking at bus service delays.

Their study looked at what effect the running time has on the reliability of Christchurch’s Orbiter bus service especially when it is impacted by traffic congestion.

They examined the issue because the rate of private vehicle ownership in Christchurch is very high and the bus service needs to be reliable if it is to attract car users to use buses instead. Their study looked at what effect variation in the running times between stops has on the reliability of Christchurch’s Orbiter bus service especially when it is impacted by traffic congestion.

``The Orbiter bus service is a popular route which travels in a circular route around Christchurch. It provides service to different outlying areas without going through Christchurch business district,’’ Kumar says.

``Buses on the Orbiter are scheduled to arrive at stops at 10 minute intervals. Our research showed only about 30 percent of buses arrived close to on-schedule, about 26 percent of buses arrived distinctly early and about 44 percent of buses arrived distinctly late.

``We carried out 30 bus surveys on the Orbiter for four days running and each Orbiter trip took about an hour and 30 minutes. At each stop, we counted the number of people boarding and departing, the arrival time, and departure time. We found there is a lot of variability in the time it takes for a passenger to board or leave the bus - between 12 seconds and up to 110 seconds.

``We found that travel times are significantly more variable for some sectors of the Orbiter route than for other sectors. The travel time of the Riccarton Mall to Barrington Mall sector had a great deal of variation. This could be because it had significant congestion problems.

``The travel times by bus were found to be significantly more variable for some times in the day. The bus travel time for the evening peak period was significantly more variable than the morning off-peak and noon to 2pm inter-peak,’’ Kumar says.

The Orbiter is expected to arrive close to ‘on-schedule’. Their recommendations included implementing bus priority at the Riccarton Road and Clarence Street intersection, Main North Road and Harewood Road intersection and at the Memorial Avenue and Ilam Road intersection where we observed substantial bus delays.”

``To improve the perceived reliability an app could be designed that could show where each Orbiter bus is so that people do not have to wait at a bus stop for up to a long time,’’ Robinson says.

Professor Nicholson says increasing bus reliability will make buses a more attractive form of transport and increase patronage.

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