Study On The Comprehensive Level-Of-Service Of Bus Operation In Bus Line

The Bus Rapid Transit has been promptly promoted in China with the implementation of public transportation priority development strategy. The first-class facilities should match the first-class service. However, due to the uneven operational management level, problems such as poor operation management and passenger’s low degree of satisfaction occurred. The passengers are becoming stricter with the quality of service after the BRT prices have been adjusted in major cities. In addition, the expanding quantity of private cars and deterioration of air environment have promoted the reduction both in distributing rates of BRT and revenue of operating company in many cities which were famous for BRT, such as Jinan. As an inevitable link in trip, the experience of passengers appears vital in particular. Therefore, it’s meaningful to measure and evaluate the operation LOS of BRT, then take the corresponding measures to improve the service quality and raise the attraction of BRT.Two common measurements ("Efficiency" and "Reliability") are selected and "Smoothness" is newly introduced to measure the uncomfortable feeling of passengers caused by the speed change. In order to improve the effectiveness of measurement, this paper built a comprehensive system of operation Level-of-Service (LOS) in BRT line after having analyzed the characteristics of BRT operation and passengers’feeling. This system can be divided into evaluation method and the degree of accuracy analysis. Evaluation method is based on dual perspectives (operator&passenger). Operators pay more attention to operation effect of overall line and passengers pay more attention to feeling of themselves. According to the different perspectives, different measure models are established. On the other hand, accuracy analysis gets data from likert scale in questionnaire. The questionnaire designed progressive problem links to let all those surveyed know the concepts of three indexes then make overall evaluation. After comparison of the results of the index calculation and questionnaire analysis, the best perspective is determined.This paper chooses BRT1 in Jinan as research case. Referring to the above steps, data collection and theoretical analysis is carried out. The result of questionnaire shows that most of passengers are enterprise staff aged 18-40 years old whose monthly salary is between 2000-5000 Yuan, taking BRT for the purpose of commute. Among them, the passengers who have chosen "31-40 years old", "monthly salary between 3001-5000 Yuan", "for commute" and "enterprise staff" have a low evaluation on the "Reliability" and "Efficiency". The elderly and female passengers have a low opinion of the "Smoothness" due to their weak body. Therefore pay attention to the negative evaluation of the commuters and the weak passengers will help to discover the passengers need and insufficient of the BRT operation process.The analysis result shows that the operators from the perspective of objective index "Smoothness", "Efficiency", "Reliability" and Overall evaluation results from the perspective of operator is B, C, E, C. Results from the perspective of passenger is B, B, C, B. The results of the questionnaire for the four items are B, B, C, and B. It’s obvious that the evaluation method from passenger perspective can reflect the feelings of passengers.