TCRP Report 235: Improving Access and Management of Transit ITS Data

This research study for the Transportation Research Board explored transit agency needs and uses of AVL, APC, and AFC data in order to create a standard data specification for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) data.

With the proliferation of bus and rail intelligent transportation systems (ITS) such as automatic vehicle location (AVL), automatic passenger counters (APC), automatic fare collection (AFC), and scheduling systems, transit agencies have the ability to collect increasingly granular operations data on service performance, customer behavior, and financial recovery. Rather than relying on manually collected data samples, transit planners and analysts have access to comprehensive, automatically collected data sets that can be used in combination to better understand detailed travel data to inform decisions that result in improvements to the efficiency, effectiveness, and safety of the transit network.

Foursquare ITP contributed to this data specification through leading in-depth interviews and a practitioners workshop with transit agency staff, ITS vendors, and transit advocacy groups to gather feedback on ITS data use cases and desired output formats.

This study resulted in a data structure and set of tools that transit agencies and ITS vendors can adopt to standardize APC, AVL, and AFC data, similar to the general transit feed specification (GTFS) format for transit schedule data.