Bus Rapid Transit vs. Metro. Monitoring on-board comfort of competing transit services via sensors

The increasing use of the private vehicles makes it increasingly fundamental to understand how to induce users to prefer public transport. In this regard, studying the quality of public transport and the methods to increase them is central. There are several factors involved in the definition of the quality level of a public transport system: reliability, regularity of the service, crowding level, on-board comfort, etc. In this paper, the research is focused on the analysis of on-board comfort, in particular, on the comparison between the level of comfort of two different public transport systems: metro and bus. The investigation of on-board comfort has been carried out based on the collection of kinematic data (accelerations along three axes), through a sensor installed inside public vehicles. The acceleration' values were analysed according to the ISO 2631-1. The aim is to identify which of the two transport systems is the most comfortable and to identify strategies for improving the level of comfort.