Understanding Travel Behavior of the Special Populations using Smart Card Data: A Case Study of Suzhou, China

摘要

Understanding travel behavior of public transit users, especially special populations, is essential for the planning and management of urban public transit facilities and services. The wide use of automated fare collection systems makes it possible to gain large amounts of data on the usage of public transit. Based on smart card data for Suzhou, this paper analyzed travel behavior of special populations who are physiologically and psychologically different from other populations, such as the elderly, students and disabled. This paper starts with a detailed discussion of the structure of smart card data and presents a series of data preprocessing methods. After data cleaning, descriptive statistics and clustering were used for travel behavior analysis. The results show that behavioral characteristics not only differ between the special and general populations but also vary among the elderly, disabled and students.