Recently, the traditional taxi industry has been struggling to keep its market share, especially with the emergence of new transport network companies (e.g., Uber). One of the problems with traditional taxi services is the difficulty of matching the taxi demand to its supply when there is no phone-booking or other reservation system. From that perspective, the taxi driver?s experience is important in reaching the next passenger. A taxi driver with limited experience may not know the high-demand locations and times of taxi stands or street sections to visit after dropping off a passenger. This causes a large number of vacant taxi drivers to regularly cruise the roads to search for a passenger, contributing to congestion, pollution, and resource waste. We formulate the problem of a taxi driver?s next passenger pickup location as a destination choice problem. Vacant taxi trips between drop-off and pickup points are extracted from GPS records obtained from a taxi operator in Lisbon, Portugal, to understand the travel behavior of vacant taxi drivers. We have estimated destination choice models with a multinomial logit and a nested logit structure. It was found that passenger demand at the pickup area, hotspot locations, service location preference, and major transport hubs positively influence a taxi driver?s next choice of passenger pickup location. Results of this study provide insight regarding the factors that explain a taxi driver?s probability to choose a certain zone within a set of passenger pickup zones, contributing to a better understanding of taxi driver travel behavior.

@en

This paper presents an analysis of regularity in public transport usage based on a large-scale bus transportation data of Lisbon, Portugal. By exploring the combined information from the bus boarding history of riders and bus arrivals at each bus stop, an analysis of individual bus usage was performed. Daily and weekly patterns were extracted, from which it was observed that a rider takes, on average, 2 trips, visits 1.93 distinct stops, and uses 1.55 distinct bus lines daily. Inter-trip time analysis revealed a daily cycle, and a study of the interaction between riders and bus infrastructure explored how usage was concentrated on particular bus lines and stops.

@en

This paper presents a study of the predictability of bus usage based on massive bus ride data collected from Lisbon, Portugal. An understanding of public bus usage behavior is important for future development of personalized transport information systems that are equipped with proactive capabilities such as predictive travel recommender systems. In this study, we show that there exists a regularity in the bus usage and that daily bus rides can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy. In addition, we show that there are spatial and temporal factors that influence bus usage predictability. These influential factors include bus usage frequency, number of different bus lines and stops used, and time of rides.@en

Direct and easy access to public transport information is an important factor for improving the satisfaction and experience of transport users. In the future, public transport information systems could be turned into personalized recommender systems which can help riders save time, make more effective decisions and avoid frustrating situations. In this paper, we present a predictive study of the mobility patterns of public transport users to lay the foundation for transport information systems with proactive capabilities. By making use of travel card data from a large population of bus riders, we describe algorithms that can anticipate bus stops accessed by individual riders to generate knowledge about future transport access patterns. To this end, we investigate and compare different prediction algorithms that can incorporate various influential factors on mobility in public transport networks, e.g., travel distance or travel hot spots. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that by combining personal and population-wide mobility patterns we can improve prediction accuracy, even with little knowledge of past behavior of transport users.

@en

There is huge potential in increasing the value of public transportation by creating novel travel information systems which are centred on the individual transport user. Especially, in dense urban cities where it is hard to oversee complex transport networks that are subject to frequent changes, maintenance and construction works, travellers want to be proactively notified about disruptions and traffic incidents relevant to their future behaviour. In this paper, we show how to mine characteristic patterns of the transport routines of urban bus riders for the design of novel travel information system that have the ability to understand forthcoming travel needs of individual users. We leverage on travel histories collected from automated fare collection system (AFC) to extract features of personal transport usage and study their predictive power to forecast whether people access public transport services on a future day or not.

@en