Headway Overview by Arrival

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Use this dashboard to track the spacing of vehicle arrivals on routes. Headway relates to how often a stop is serviced by a particular route. This report allows you to assess the on-time, gapped, and bunched statuses of arrivals over varying time periods and by route.

The definition of these terms are as follows:

  • Gapped: Actual arrivals are spread out too much compared to the scheduled arrivals. This condition lengthens the amount of time riders need to wait for the next vehicle.
  • Bunched: Actual arrivals are too close together compared to the scheduled arrivals. This condition shortens the amount time between arrivals to a sub-optimal period.

The Routes Monitored for Headway filter in the filter pane allows you to display routes that are set to Monitor for Headway, which is a setting in the Routes tab in myAvail. However, if you do not use this filter, you can monitor the spacing between vehicles for other routes. For this report to produce meaningful results, routes should have a regular interval between arrivals, such as every 15 minutes. That spacing can change during the day, such as 15 minutes for peak times and 30 minutes for off-peak. However, routes that have irregular intervals are unlikely to produce meaningful results.

The table on the top-left displays headway performance for the previous day. Use it to determine whether the statuses for the previous day’s headway arrivals were unusual. This table can help you identify the beginning of a problematic trend.

The line charts help you identify problematic trends for routes that have unacceptable amounts of arrivals that are gapped or bunched. Some trends are easier to identify over time. Look for a sustained decline in headway performance.

The bar chart along the bottom displays headway arrival statuses by routes over the past 30 days. Use this chart to determine whether any routes have an unacceptable amount of gapped or bunched arrivals within the past month. This chart can be helpful when only particular routes have a problem with on-time arrivals because the line charts for the entire fleet might not indicate that there is a problem.

Clicking any of the charts on the top row opens the Headway Performance by Route Arrival report in a new window where you have more options for drilling down and filtering. If you click  a bar for a route in the bottom chart, myAvail opens the Headway Performance By Stop Arrival report in a new window. This report displays a bar chart of the headway performance for that route by stop.

For this dashboard, use the filter pane to apply filters across the entire dashboard. You can use the following specialized filters:

  • Show On-time Categories: Show statuses for On-time, Gapped, Bunched, Gapped Outlier, Bunched Outlier headway arrivals. By default, the dashboard displays all these statuses. Deselect the statuses you do not want to see.
  • Include Missed Stops: Check to display missed A missed stop occurs when there is a scheduled arrival, but the system does not record that arrival.
  • Include Outliers: Check to display outliers in the report. An outlier occurs when a value exceeds the relevant outlier threshold.
  • Include Detours: Check to display data that the system records while vehicles are on a detour. These results might be atypical.
  • Routes Monitored for Headway: Filter the report by one or more routes that the system is monitoring for headway. If no routes are selected in this filter, the report displays all routes, including those not being monitored for headway.
  • Bunched Threshold (% Under): Specify how to determine that a vehicle’s arrival is bunched too closely to the previous vehicle’s arrival. When 1 - (Actual difference between arrivals/Scheduled difference between arrivals) is greater than or equal to the bunched threshold percentage, the system counts it as a bunched arrival.
  • Gapped Threshold (% Over): Specify how to determine that a vehicle has departed When (Actual difference between arrivals/Scheduled difference between arrivals) 1 is greater than or equal to the gapped threshold percentage, the system counts it as a gapped arrival.
  • Bunched Outlier (% Under): Specify how to determine whether a vehicle is an early When a vehicle departs earlier than the threshold number of minutes before the scheduled arrival time, the system counts it as an early outlier. Outliers can be tracked separately in this report.
  • Gapped Outlier (% Over): Specify how to determine whether a vehicle is a late outlier. When a vehicle departs later than the threshold number of minutes after the scheduled arrival time, the system counts it as a late outlier. This report can track outliers separately.
  • Stop Departure Threshold: Use this field to exclude stops with very low sample Enter the minimum sample size that BI will display. Smaller values will include more stops but some of those stops will have a small sample size.
  • Target On-time Percentage: Specify your agency’s target on-time arrival percentage. The charts on this dashboard display the target percentage as a blue-dashed line that you can compare to the actual on-time arrivals.
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