Assessing the public transport travel behavior consistency from smart card data

The aim of this research is to measure, using smart card data, how much do public transport users change their behavior through time. To quantify the change in behavior, we split the smart card records of a user into a set of separated time windows. Then, we measure the variation between each pair of time windows. Three algorithms that calculate the variation in users’ mobility are assessed. Using data from a Canadian transport system, we show that measuring the stability of user behavior at an individual level provides new insights for public transport operators, e.g., it can be used to measure users’ adaptability to changes in the transport system.