Exploring Measures to Monitor Passenger-Centric Punctuality in Public Transport

Abderrahman Ait-Ali, K2 Working paper 2024:9 (2024)

Public transport plays a vital role in urban mobility and accessibility, with reliability, particularly punctuality, being a key factor in ensuring passenger satisfaction and sustaining long-term ridership. Traditional measures, such as On-Time Performance (OTP), often focus on vehicle performance and tend to overlook passengers’ experiences. This report explores alternative, passenger-centred punctuality measures that more accurately reflect passengers’ actual travel experiences, that is, passenger-centred punctuality metrics.

Key findings:

• There are various passenger-centred measures that can be used to assess public transport reliability more accurately by accounting for passenger demand and travel experiences across different transport modes and time periods.
• The measures reviewed differ in terms of their relevance, accuracy and feasibility for monitoring passenger punctuality within public transport systems.
• A key challenge in implementing these measures is the limited availability and quality of passenger data, as well as the technical complexity involved in integrating such measures with existing systems.
• Passenger-centred measures enable more effective monitoring of passenger punctuality and improved operational management, particularly in spatio-temporal contexts where demand variations are significant.