Group25 Proposal

Journey to the End of the Line
Recommendation for Singapore Bus Routes Enhancement

OVERVIEW

PROPOSAL

POSTER

APPLICATION

REPORT

Introduction

Buses forms a significant part of public transport in Singapore, Singapore's bus system has an extensive network of routes covering most places in Singapore, with over 3.9 million rides taken per day on average as of 2016, and is the most economical way to get around, as well as being one of the most scenics. There are more than 300 scheduled bus services, operated by SBS Transit, SMRT Buses, Tower Transit Singapore and Go-Ahead Singapore. The newest bus operator, Go-Ahead Singapore started operation from 4 September 2016. There are also around 4,600 buses currently in operation.

Transportation plays a cardinal role in escalating the mobility, prosperity, and connectivity of a community. The more the people are satisfied with the public transportation, the more they tend to use it. The more the people use public transportation, the higher are the chances of them not buying a personal vehicle. The higher the chances of people not buying a personal vehicle, the lesser we will see cars running on the road. The lesser the cars running on the road the lesser will be the pollution generated. So, If we look at the macro picture, we see that not only the society gets affected by public transportation system but also the whole world. And, everything then comes down to the satisfaction level of the people using it.

Our main objective in this project was to look for bus routes having similar looping pattern as bus 972 as shown below, we call such routes as problematic routes. These problematic routes can result in a substantial waste of time for the people traveling from the starting point to its destination point as they have to unnecessary travel through all the bus stops in the loop until the bus takes the highway route. This futile traveling leads results in a waste of time, waste of money and bus overcrowdedness.

Example of the problematic bus route(Bus - 972)

Inspiration

According to Travel+Leisure and other such reputed websites, Singapore comes second in the list of top 15 countries with the best land transportation system. Because of the effective connectivity of bus stops and MRT stations, economic ticket rates and less traveling time, people usually go for using buses as their primary means of transport. As we can see below according to the data we found out that in the year 2016 48.2% of the total Singaporeans were using Buses and since then the numbers have been going up. This ever-increasing number of bus commuters require us to pay more attention towards making bus routes and buses more efficient for the commuters.

A peek into the proportion of people using different transportation and the trend of number of people using bus over the years

Issues & Problem

1. Problematic Bus Routes
   Some of the buses take a substantial amount of time to travel from starting point to the destination. For example, the route given below is of bus number 972, As we can see for a person to travel from the starting point to the ending point, he has to travel through a lot of bus stops which actually doesn't fall on his route which results in wasting the time and also money of the commuter. These kinds of buses usually circle around an area, picking all the passengers up and then transits into the highway. Now, such bus routes can cause overcrowding in buses and delay for the passenger alighting at the end of the circle before the transit.

1. Bus Stops Coverage
   Another problem that Singapore buses currently have is that there are buses that do not stop at bus stops even though they are inside their coverage routes. This can create a problem for elderly passenger (or passenger with special needs) as the passenger needs to walk to the other bus stops even though there are bus stops near the passenger place that the bus pass through.

1. Activity of Bus Stops
   While visualizing the connectivity of the buses from their starting bus stop to their destination bus stop, we realized that there were few bus stops whose activity i.e. buses coming in and going out from that particular bus stop was similar to the bus interchanges. We call such bus stops as potential bus stops which can be upgraded to bus interchange.

1. Connectivity of Bus Stop
   Connectivity is another measure which has to be considered before coming to a conclusion that a bus stop can be upgraded to a bus interchange. So, only when the connectivity of the potential bus stops as explained above is really good i.e. the potential bus stop is connected to various other destination points we can suggest that these bus stops can be converted to bus interchange.

Challenges

Some of the challenges that we will encounter in this project:

1. Finding appropriate longest route with longer time.
   This is not only a roadblock but the first stepping stone. As we aim to optimize the bus routes we need to spot the longest routes with the longer time. Once we are done with this we can investigate further on how close the bus stops are on the way and how can we decrease the time taken by the bus to cover its whole journey.

1. Finding nearest bus stops to MRT station.
   Since MRT stations are the most important source as well as a destination for the Bus commuters, So the distance to/from a Bus Stop is always of utmost importance. So, for these hotspots, we have to find the nearest bus stop and optimize them, if possible. For example, If a bus service is already passing by the MRT and still it’s bus stop is quite far ( say more than 50m ) Then we can optimize it to the nearer one if any. Also, if there’s a case that there is not even a single bus stop near an MRT station then we can propose to build one.

Source of Dataset

Data	Source
Singapore Bus Stops	https://www.mytransport.sg/content/dam/datamall/datasets/LTA_DataMall_API_User_Guide.pdf
Singapore Bus Routes	https://www.mytransport.sg/content/dam/datamall/datasets/LTA_DataMall_API_User_Guide.pdf
Singapore Bus Services	https://www.mytransport.sg/content/dam/datamall/datasets/LTA_DataMall_API_User_Guide.pdf
MRT Stations coordinate	https://www.mytransport.sg/content/dam/datamall/datasets/LTA_DataMall_API_User_Guide.pdf

About Dataset

Our data is collected using LTA's API to access their database and scrape the data by using Python. The dataset that we currently have are:
1. Singapore Bus Stops.
This dataset contains a list of all currently existed Bus Stops across whole Singapore. It contained 4,985 data consist of a unique code as well as the latitude and longitude coordinate for each Bus Stop. However, as the coordinate is based on WGS84(World Geodetic System), we have to convert the coordinate into a SYV21 system. Detailed step to convert will be explained in the report.

2. Singapore Bus Routes.
This dataset contains a list of all route that Singapore bus currently have. It contained 25,959 data consist of bus stops code and the bus service number, as well as the distance between each bus stops that buses follow.

3. Singapore Bus Services.
This dataset contains a list of all Singapore Bus that currently in service. It contained 1,410 data consist of buses code and the destination code for that bus.

4. MRT Stations coordinate.
This dataset contains coordinate of all Singapore MRT Stations. Unfortunately, the file is in SHP and we can only open one of them .SHP file using JMP. Therefore, there is no detail regarding the name of the MRT stations. We will have to manually match the data with the MRT Station in google map based on this coordinate. The coordinate is based on SVY21 system.