Use of Smart Card Data to Define Public Transit Use in Seoul,South Korea

Abstract

In South Korea, use of the smart card to pay public transit fares has grown since its introduction in 1996. The proportion of smart card use in Seoul, South Korea, is more than 90% for buses and 75% for Metro. In 2004, the Seoul metropolitan government introduced a new smart card system that has a distance-based fare system, which requires the input of detailed user data, such as boarding time and Global Positioning System–based vehicle location. To investigate the reliability of smart card data, the number of users of every Metro station in Seoul, gathered from smart card data, was directly compared with data obtained from the Seoul Metro Company. By using two simple manipulations to include daily variations and the number of cash users, smart card data appear to be statistically similar to the surveyed data obtained from the Seoul Metro Company. By analyzing the line-specific proportions of smart card use rather than the average smart card use, the accuracy of the results is improved. From the results, it can be seen that smart card data show potential as a basis for describing the characteristics of public transit users, such as the number of transfers, boarding time, hourly trip distribution of the number of trips for different transit modes, and travel time distribution for all transit modes and user types.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

TCRP Report 10: Fare Policies, Structures, and Technologies. TRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1996.

Giuliano

, Moore

J. E.

II , and Golob

Integrated Smart-Card Fare System: Results from Field Operational Test. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1735, TRB, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 2000, pp. 138–146.

Barth

, Todd

, and Shaheen

Intelligent Transportation Technology Elements and Operational Methodologies for Shared-Use Vehicle Systems. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1841, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2003, pp. 99–108.

Cheung

Tripperpas Smart Card Project: Lessons from the Netherlands. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1887, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2004, pp. 147–152.

Espinosa

J. M.

, Holm

E. F.

, and White

M. E.

Creating Intelligent, Coordinated Transit: Moving New Mexico the Smart Way. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1927, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2005, pp. 139–148.

Iseki

, Yoh

A. C.

, and Taylor

B. D.

Are Smart Cards the Smart Way to Go? Examining Their Adoption by U.S. Transit Agencies. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1992, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2007, pp. 45–53.

Bagchi

, and White

P. R.

The Potential of Public Transport Smart Card Data. Transport Policy, Vol. 12, 2005, pp. 464–474.

Utsunomiya

, Attanucci

, and Wilson

N. H.

Potential Uses of Transit Smart Card Registration and Transaction Data to Improve Transit Planning. In Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 1971, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2006, pp. 119–126.

Trépanier

, and Chapleau

Destination Estimation from Public Transport Smart Card Data. Presented at 12th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM), Saint-Étienne, France, 2006.

10.

Morency

, Trépanier

, and Agard

Measuring Transit Use Variability with Smart-Card Data. Transport Policy, Vol. 14, 2007, pp. 193–203.