Measuring Inter-Stop Distances to Improve Scheduling, Costing, and Enhance Sustainable Urban Mobility

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper quantifies the economic and operational impact of spatial accuracy in metropolitan public transport systems, proposing a standardized GIS-based method for measuring inter-stop distances. Addressing the geometric limitations of legacy GTFS data, this study introduces a replicable workflow that integrates open spatial data with infrastructure-specific maneuvering constraints. The method was validated in the Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolis (GZM), achieving near-identical precision to manual field measurements (MAPE ≈ 0.02%) while offering superior scalability compared to traditional odometer or satellite-based techniques. The analysis reveals that even minor measurement errors (approx. 2.5%) in legacy datasets propagate into significant budget misallocations, estimated at tens of thousands of PLN per line annually. These findings demonstrate that precise distance computation is a fundamental driver of cost efficiency and schedule reliability in large-scale transit networks.