Transfer’s monitoring in bus transit services by Automatic Vehicle Location data

Since transfers increase the connectivity of routes, they improve the characteristics of transit networks. Designing and managing transfers are well-investigated issues arising at the tactical and operational level. Conversely, the monitoring phase was rarely faced to verify the consistency between well planned and/or delivered transfers. In this paper, we tailor an innovative methodology for measuring the rate of transfers between two routes by using archived Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) data. This measurement is performed spatially, at shared and unshared (but reasonably quite close) bus stops, and temporally at each time period. The results are represented by easy-to-read control dashboards. This methodology is tested by about 240,000 AVL real records provided by the local bus operator of Cagliari (Italy) and provides valuable insights into the characterization of transfers.