Benefits to the Academic Community of Standardization of Bus Transit Automatic Vehicle Location Data

Automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems offer transit agencies and the academic community vast quantities of data on the operation of bus transit networks. However, turning this raw data into useful metrics that are of interest can be cumbersome and requires a significant amount of processing of AV L log files. Both transit agencies and the academic community would benefit if the AV L system output such metrics in a standardized format. This paper summarizes existing data exchange standards used in the bus transit industry and explains their benefits. A recent project undertaken by London Buses to analyze dwell time data is described, and the difficulties and costs involved in collecting the basic data required for analysis are highlighted. The paper proposes that more data standards should be defined for data output by AV L systems. If these standards were then implemented by AV L vendors, transit agencies and academics could get easy access to useful information that otherwise would require much time and cost to obtain.