Knowing who rides
People on the move want to reach their destination. When people move around in public spaces and board public transport as passengers, they generate a movement pattern that becomes visible with automatic passenger counting - from start to finish. Residents and visitors in the city are constantly on the move, traveling to work, shopping, school, events, and friends... Being on the move day and night is characteristic of the city. Passenger flows are formed. They become local data that improve mobility in cities.
In our growing cities, it's no longer only at rush hour that traffic on the roads and rails gets crowded and slow. Observing and analyzing passenger flows provides information about where it regularly gets crowded, which routes and lines are more congested than others, and where more resources are needed.
The more traffic planners know about people's movement patterns, the better they can plan for them. As a result, the way home at rush hour should also be relaxed and pleasant. Passenger Flow is the basis for projections and simulations for new services. What effect will additional stops, more streetcars on the route, a new bus line, and a changed routing have on passenger flows?
Benefits
Investing in passenger flow means investing in:
- Tested investment strategies: The passenger flow’s movement patterns can be used to recognize and simulate how much relief and improvement an expansion would bring to the network.
- More product and service innovation: If you know the exact needs, you can control them better – with new routes, higher frequency, flexible units and other new mobility services.
- High customer satisfaction: Buses and trains that are not just on time and reliable but also offer room for everyone and arrive directly, quickly and without traffic delays – that’s attractive public transport.
- More certainty on the road: Transparent communication provides a more relaxed journey, even at peak times, and timely information about alternative routes, so that people flows are distributed more quickly.
- Increased revenues: When more people get on board, more people are paying for the service.
- Strong partnerships: The more data an analysis receives, the better it gets. Open data platforms with various partners are useful for everyone, especially for citizens.
Urban Intelligence
Needs Local Data
Capturing and analyzing movement patterns in a city is a challenging endeavor. Our software DILAX Citisense generates important analyses and reports on passenger flow across the entire transportation network for the strategic and operational management of mobility providers. In the process, many local data sources come together, e.g. passenger counts, ticketing data, wifi tracking, location data, weather, and event calendars. Together they create a common picture of movement in the city, visualized as an OD matrix.
Why is this important?
With DILAX, you can monitor and evaluate the passenger flow in your network. A range of local data sources becomes the basis for decisions about investments, expansions, products, and changes that were previously based primarily on guesswork. The well-founded insights into passenger flow pay off in every respect: for the passengers, agencies, and the city.
„APC data is one of the most important data sets that we can have to plan our trips and set up the network. Obviously, we are using it for fleet management, we are using it for route planning. We use the data a lot for simple reporting [...] We use it to add new stops. And in general, we use the APC data as a core data set to show us where to improve the network as a whole."
Daði Áslaugarson, Head of IT, Strætó bs at Panel Discussion on "How an increased demand for passenger information shapes fleet planning in post-COVID times“
New Prioirities
Making better journeys together
The transformation of mobility is already here, bringing new mobility services and critical questions about mobility policy. Cars do not automatically have the right of way. Bicycles and pedestrians also need space to move around. Here, public transport is even more in demand, because it is the only way to guarantee mobility for millions of passengers a day in an ecological, economic and social way.
