Winnipeg Transit Bus Pass Ups - Initial Look and University of Manitoba Routes

Introduction

Bus pass ups occur when a bus is to full to accept additional riders at a stop. This can cause frustration with the transit system, causing riders waiting longer, late/missing appointments, and causes loss in confidence of the system.

Data

The data was acquired from the fantastic Open Data Portal for the City of Winnipeg. Winnipeg Transit publishes daily data set to the portal allowing for export or querying through Socrata Open Data API (SODA). For this, an export in comma separated value (csv) will be used, though R packages due exist to communicate the SODA such as RSocrata. Data was recorded by the operator pressing a button to record the event of a pass up.

The data set from the export will have the following types in R (data set page has column info to compare with):

Column.Name	Type	Description
Pass Up Id	number	Unique Key (pk)
Pass Up Type	character	Type of pass up
Time	character	Time at which the button was pressed to record a pass up
Route Number	number	Which route number this occurred on
Route Name	character	Name of route
Route Destination	character	Destination for the bus
Location	character	Location where the button was pressed to record a pass up

Data Clean Up

After reading in the export, taking a look at what kind of data is available and if clean up is needed.

summary(passUps)

##    Pass.Up.ID      Pass.Up.Type           Time            Route.Number    Route.Name        Route.Destination 
##  Min.   : 363450   Length:126736      Length:126736      Min.   :  1.0   Length:126736      Length:126736     
##  1st Qu.:1280690   Class :character   Class :character   1st Qu.: 18.0   Class :character   Class :character  
##  Median :1953240   Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Median : 38.0   Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##  Mean   :1903768                                         Mean   : 60.7                                        
##  3rd Qu.:2585844                                         3rd Qu.: 75.0                                        
##  Max.   :3083223                                         Max.   :185.0                                        
##                                                          NA's   :49                                           
##    Location        
##  Length:126736     
##  Class :character  
##  Mode  :character  
##                    
##                    
##                    
##

We want to remove ‘bad’ data, in this case, where the route number is missing.

passUps <- passUps[!is.na(passUps$Route.Number),]

Since pass up type is a character class, this must be looked at to get a sense of the data.

unique(passUps$Pass.Up.Type)

## [1] "Wheelchair User Pass-Up" "Full Bus Pass-Up"

From this, the ‘Full Bus Pass-Up’ events are what the focus is on.

passUps.fb <- passUps[passUps$Pass.Up.Type == "Full Bus Pass-Up",]

Next, the Time column is character. This should be converted to date/time class.

## [1] "10/30/2019 03:52:39 PM"

In the future, we will want to analyse the Location data, I will leave the clean up for this another time.

Initial Look

For analysis, we will be using dply and ggplot2.

library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(scales)

Looking first at the top routes with pass ups:

knitr::kable(passUps.fb %>% group_by(route=Route.Number) %>% summarise(count=n()) %>% arrange(desc(count)) %>% head(10), align='c')

route	count
11	10397
75	9113
162	9050
160	6785
18	6005
19	5981
21	5473
36	4193
16	4139
22	3324

With route 11, 75, 162, 160, and 19 being the routes with the largest number of pass ups. Since a bus route can have multiple sub routes (to/from different destinations), we will want to see if there is particular routes that have more pass up events.

routePassUps.dest <- passUps.fb %>% group_by(route=Route.Number, from=Route.Name, to=Route.Destination) %>% summarise(count=n()) %>% arrange(desc(count))

route	from	to	count
75	Crosstown East	To University of Manitoba	5356
160	Downtown-UM	To University of Manitoba	3927
162	Ft. Richmond-St. Norbert Express	To University of Manitoba	3675
36	Northwest Super Express	To U of Manitoba	3095
75	Crosstown East	To Kildonan Place	2997

This shows that trips to the University of Manitoba occupies the top spots and will be focused on here.

The routes can be found below. The 160 and 162 share a lot of the same stops but 162 services St. Norbert area which greatly extends the range into south Winnipeg.

Route	Number of Stops
36 Northwest Super Express	1
75 Crosstown East	1
160 Downtown to University of Manitoba	1
162 Downtown to Ft Richmond to U of M to St Norbert Express	1

The above lists total number of stops on a round trip route.

University of Manitoba Top Pass Up Routes

Let us filter out the results from above.

topUofMPassUp <- passUps.fb %>% filter(Route.Number %in% c(75, 160, 162, 36) 
                                       & Route.Name %in% c('Crosstown East', 'Downtown-UM', 'Ft. Richmond-St. Norbert Express', "Northwest Super Express") 
                                       & Route.Destination %in% c('To University of Manitoba', 'To University of Manitoba', 'To University of Manitoba', 'To U of Manitoba'))

Since this is trips mostly to the University of Manitoba, we should expect most of these pass ups to occur during Fall and Winter sessions with minimal pass ups during the summer months.

uOfMMonth <- topUofMPassUp %>% mutate(month=format(as.Date(Time, format="%m/%d/%Y"), "%m")) %>% 
  group_by(month=month, route=Route.Number, route.name=Route.Name, route.destination=Route.Destination) %>% 
  summarise(count=n())

ggplot(uOfMMonth, aes(month, count, fill=factor(route))) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity", position='dodge') + 
  guides(fill=guide_legend(title=NULL)) + 
  xlab('Month') + 
  ylab('Number of Pass Ups') +
  ggtitle('Month vs Number of Pass Ups of Routes 36, 75, 160, 162') + 
  scale_x_discrete(labels=month.abb)

The increase in pass ups in September and January most likely coincide with the start of Fall/Winter terms at the University of Manitoba as well as other schools being back in session. The decline in pass ups between September - December and January - April could be due to many reasons such as riders car pooling, not attending every class, leaving earlier/later to avoid full busses, or dropping out. Since daily ridership numbers and University of Manitoba enrollment numbers per month are not available, it is not possible to decern why this change occurs.

Looking at this but breaking it over the years:

uOfMMonYr <- topUofMPassUp %>% mutate(yearMon=format(Time, "%Y-%m-01")) %>% 
  group_by(yearMon, route=Route.Number, route.name=Route.Name, route.destination=Route.Destination) %>% 
  summarise(count=n())

ggplot(uOfMMonYr, aes(as.Date(yearMon), count, fill=factor(route))) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity", position="dodge") + 
  scale_x_date(breaks=pretty_breaks(nrow(uOfMMonYr)/12)) + 
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, vjust=0.5)) + 
  guides(fill=guide_legend(title=NULL)) + 
  ylab('Number of Pass Ups') +
  xlab('Month of Year') + 
  ggtitle('Month of Year vs Number of Pass Ups for Routes 36, 75, 160, 162')

This does look like it is happening every year in January and September.

Another observation we should expect is that weekend pass ups should be minimal. Further, the 36 also does not run on weekends, so we should not expect any pass ups for the 36 on Saturday or Sunday.

# %a Full weekday
uOfMWeek <- topUofMPassUp %>% mutate(day=format(Time, "%A")) %>% 
  group_by(day, route=Route.Number, route.name=Route.Name, route.destination=Route.Destination) %>% 
  summarise(count=n())

ggplot(uOfMWeek, aes(day, count, fill=factor(route))) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity", position="dodge") + 
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, vjust=0.5)) + 
  guides(fill=guide_legend(title=NULL)) + 
  scale_x_discrete(limits=c('Sunday','Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday','Thursday', 'Friday','Saturday')) + 
  xlab('Day of Week') + 
  ylab('Number of Pass Ups') +
  ggtitle('Day of Week vs Number of Pass Ups of Routes 36, 75, 160, 162')

Which we see now that there is very few pass ups going to the University of Manitoba on the weekends.

A quick look at the times of pass ups can see if these are ‘rush hour’ type pass ups or happening consistently through the day. For this, the pass up times will be rounded to the nearest hour. This could be drilled down further but will provide an initial exploratory look.

The exploratory look will not take into account that different routes have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedules but different schedules on Tuesday/Thursday. Again, weekend schedules may be different as well, this could be explored later.

uOfMHourly <- topUofMPassUp %>% mutate(hour=format(round(Time, units="hours"), "%H:%M")) %>% 
  group_by(hour, route=Route.Number, route.name=Route.Name, route.destination=Route.Destination) %>% 
  summarise(count=n())

ggplot(uOfMHourly, aes(hour, count, fill=factor(route))) + 
  geom_bar(stat="identity", position="dodge") + 
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle=90, vjust=0.5)) + 
  guides(fill=guide_legend(title=NULL)) + 
  scale_x_discrete(limits=c(paste0(paste0("0",1:9), ":00"), paste0(11:24,":00"))) + 
  xlab('Hour') + 
  ylab('Number of Pass Ups') +
  ggtitle('Hour of Day vs Number of Pass Ups of Routes 36, 75, 160, 162')

## Warning: Removed 5 rows containing missing values (geom_bar).

From this, the 36 and 75 have spikes in the morning while almost no pass ups going to the University of Manitoba during the afternoon evening. The 160/162 has spikes both in the morning and in the afternoon which may be due to the areas serviced. As both run from downtown to the south parts of Winnipeg and even past the perimeter on the to University of Manitoba route, it may be different demographics in the afternoon, people returning from work than students going to class.

Further Analysis

Taking this further, looking at which areas along these routes a pass up is likely to occur, using the GPS coordinates given may be of interest. This, as well as exploratory analysis here can be drilled further down due to scheduling into day/time and years.