Paper Details

TRB 89th Annual Meeting (January 10-14, 2010)

Event Number:	705
Event Title:	Using Information Systems and Technology to Support Transportation Organizations
Event Date:	Jan 13 2010 4:30PM- 6:00PM
Event Location:	Hilton, Georgetown East
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Mobile Transit Trip Planning with Real-Time Data (10-3748)

In this article, we describe the development of a transit trip planner (TTP) for mobile devices called Transitr, and evaluate its performance. The system predicts the shortest paths between any two points in the transit network using real-time information provided by a third party bus arrival prediction system, relying on GPS equipped transit vehicles. Users submit their origin and destination through a map-based iPhone application, or through a JavaScript enabled web browser. A server implementing a dynamic K-shortest paths algorithm with predicted link travel times returns personalized route directions for the user, displayed on a map. To assess the optimality and accuracy of the predicted shortest paths, an a posteriori comparison with a schedule-based transit trip planner and the GPS traces of the transit vehicles is performed on six-hundred origin destination pairs in San Francisco. The results show that routing using the predicted bus arrivals marginally increases the accuracy of the total travel time and the optimality of the route. Suggestions to improve the accuracy and optimality using real-time information are proposed.

Authors
     Jariyasunant, Jerald , University of California, Berkeley
     Work, Daniel B., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
     Kerkez, Branko , University of California, Berkeley
     Sengupta, Raja , University of California, Berkeley
     Bayen, Alexandre , University of California, Berkeley
     Glaser, Steven , University of California, Berkeley