Individual Trip Destination Estimation in a Transit Smart Card Automated Fare Collection System

Abstract

The Smart Card Automated Fare Collection (SCAFC) system is an Intelligent Transportation System that is becoming increasingly popular among transit operators. In addition to fare control, the data collected by these systems can be very useful in transit planning. Many SCAFC systems store the location where the passenger boarded due to the positioning device carried onboard; however, in most systems alighting locations are not validated and, thus, not stored in databases. This article presents a model to estimate the destination location for each individual boarding a bus with a smart card. Experiments carried out with a database programming approach show that the data must be thoroughly validated and corrected prior to the estimation process. The first application of the model provided a success rate of 66% for destination estimation, reaching about 80% at peak hours. Further research will tackle the issues of error detection, correction, and link results, comparing them with those of other data sources.