User Data Items on Transit Segments

The concept of user defined data items, in which application specific data can be stored along with each element of the data bank, has been further extended. Up to now, user data items could be stored along with each node, link, turn and transit line. Newly, up to three user defined data items can also be made available for each transit line segment. These new user data items are referred to by the keywords US1, US2 and US3. They can be entered and modified as part of the itinerary in modules 2.21 and 2.22, listed and punched in module 2.24, and displayed graphically in module 2.23. The segment user data items can also be accessed as parameters in the transit time functions; and since the new Network Calculator, module 2.41, now includes computations at the level of transit lines and segments, they provide the natural means to store results of segment computations.

Some interesting applications of the segment user data items include:

• Storing and displaying of line specific on-board passenger counts. These counts can then be compared with the segment volumes from the assignment, in order to validate the transit assignment.
• Storing of line specific segment times. Up to now, it was not trivial to code the segment times of a transit line directly. Either a vector of discrete time of speed values was coded into a range of transit time functions, or (if all lines on the same link had the same speed) the times were coded on the base network. With the segment user data it is now possible to transcribe line specific segment times directly from the time-table into the line itineraries.