Data-Driven Transit Network Design from Mobile Phone Trajectories

This paper presents a data-driven method for transit network design that relies on a large sample of user location data available from mobile phone telecommunication networks. Such data provide opportunistic sensing and the means for transit operators to match supply with mobility demand inferred from mobile phone locations. In contrast to previous methods of transit network design, the proposed method is entirely data driven, leveraging the large-sample properties of disaggregate mobile phone network data and mobility pattern mining. The method works by deriving frequent patterns of movements from anonymized mobile phone location data and merging them to generate candidate route designs. Additional routines for optimal route selection and service frequency setting are then employed to select a network configuration made up of routes that maximizes systemwide traveler utility. Using data from half a million mobile phone users in Abidjan from the telco operator Orange, we demonstrated to provide resource-neutral system improvement of 27% in terms of end-user journey times.