Smart Data for Performance Monitoring of City-Bus Services-A Case Study of Ahmedabad

Indian cities are experiencing a fall in public transport ridership due to deteriorating quality of services as expressed by passengers. There has been a growing awareness on improving public transport delivery and also to monitor its performance. Although transit agencies have developed various service performance indicators/measures, the typical key performance indicators used in India are focused on the operators' perspectives, with limited emphasis on passenger and larger societal concerns. ASRTU and CIRT publications convey that many cities have installed or are in the process of installing ITS to improve performance of public transport. These applications generate huge datasets which could be leveraged for monitoring services from the user's perspective which could aid in quality improvement decisions. The main objective of this paper is to understand how user-focused performance assessment of city bus services could be undertaken using ITS applications data. For this, Ahmedabad was taken as the case city and user-focused service assessment was undertaken using sample smart datasets.