This project contains analysis code related to the study of headway adherence on UVX. The project is built as an RMarkdown website.
The Utah Valley Express (UVX) is a bus rapid transit line in Provo and Orem, Utah. The system runs with six or ten-minute headways during most weekdays. Though UVX does not publish a schedule with regular timepoints as most UTA services do, there is still a service schedule for integration with wayfinding software and for UTA's internal tracking.
The vehicles and traffic signals on the route are equipped with Transit Signal Priority (TSP) transponders. The system works such that if the buses are running behind their schedule, the bus can request additional green time from the traffic signals. There are four settings for this TSP system:
OFF: The TSP does not make any requests of the traffic signal. The system still informs the signal to run the bus cycle when a bus is present.5: The TSP requests additional green time if it is running five minutes or more behind its schedule.2: The TSP requests additional green time if it is running two minutes or more behind its schedule.ON: The TSP always requests additional green time.
In this project, we use automated vehicle location (AVL) data provided by UTA for the UVX project to determine the effect different TSP threshold settings have on headway adherence. A related research project funded by UDOT is examining the effect of these different thresholds on schedule adherence. UTA mostly cares about the latter, but it is possible that an effect can be more clearly seen in headways and in a bus-bunching scenario.
The document is built using bookdown for R, with code constructed using the
targets package.
text. To install the packages used in this analysis, run
install.packages(c("tidyverse", "lubridate", "targets", "quantreg"))Then, you can run targets::tar_make() to construct the analysis and then use
Rstudio to build the website. Building the paper requires a LaTeX installation.