Making Public Transportation Schedule Information Consumable for Improved Decision Making

Traffic chaos is increasing by the day in cities around the world, and especially in developing countries, due to rapid increase in the use of private vehicles. One reason for this trend is the lack of information about commuting choices possible with the existing public transportation network. Although schedules of individual modes may be available, they are not amenable to direct analysis and furthermore, do not give an integrated view of the services possible in the city. In this paper, we describe an efficient approach to transform readily available schedules into a more consumable standard form, and demonstrate its usage in a decision support tool for commuting choice selection. We have fine-tuned the process to remove common schedule errors and provide an integrated network view, and can easily incorporate new cities into the system within days for improved decision support. Our approach is complementary to other alternatives that work with real-time data, e.g., GPS on buses, but need longer time, investment and extensive instrumentation to implement.