Headway Estimation in Urban Buses based on Available Arrival Time Estimators

Nowadays, public transport is an indispensable urban service, helping to improve urban mobility by making it accessible to everyone, as well as reducing the pollution inside big cities. For this reason, any efforts for characterizing and improving urban public transportation systems are welcome. In the present paper we perform an analysis of the data corresponding to the arrival time estimators of the urban buses provided by the EMT (municipal transport company) of Madrid, with the aim of improving their performance and reliability. To achieve these objectives, we have developed several algorithms that, using the EMT provided data, estimate the position, arrival times and running times between stops. Finally, we estimate the headways between the buses, which can be used to monitor the performance of the service in each line.