VGI BASED URBAN PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Abstract. Recent advances in information technology have made geographic information system (GIS) a powerful and affordable tool for planning and decision making in various fields such as the public transportation. These technologies such as the social network (e.g. face-book, twitter), new technologies such as ubiquitous, mobile, Web 2.0, geo tagging and RFID can help to create better shapes and forms of the communication and geo-collaboration for public. By using these, user-generated content and spatial information can be easily and quickly produced and shared in a dynamic, interactive, multimedia and distributed environment. The concept of volunteered geographic information (VGI) has been introduced by the transaction from consultation to content interaction. VGI describes any type of content that has a geographic element and has been voluntarily collected. In other words, ordinary users; without a professional training, can participate in generating and using the spatial information. As a result, the gaps between the producers and users of GIS and spatial information, has been considerably reduced. Public transportation is one of the most important elements of the transportation system. Rapid growth of the cities has resulted in high increase of demand for the public transportation which created new challenges. Improvement of the desirability of public transportation can increase its efficiency, reduction of the environmental pollution (such as air and noise pollution), traffic problems, and fuel consumption. Hence, development of an urban public transportation system which is responsive to citizen's need and motivates them to use public transportation system is one of the most important objectives and issues that urban planners and designers are concerned about. One solution to achieve this, goal is to develop public transportation system by assistance from the system users. According to approach, users are considered as the valuable resources, because people who are in constant contact with the system can have detailed and updated information about the problems, solutions and they are affected by the related implemented policies. Thus user involvement is an essential part in public transport decision making process. Although GIS in transportation (GIS-T) has been used for data collection, spatial analysis, and spatial modeling, due to recent promotions, GIS-T is moving towards the use of capabilities of VGI to user-centric services.

The main goals of this paper are two as follows: First is to survey and review the key concepts of the geo-collaboration, to introduce and present fields to utilizing the VGI in the public transportation system to improve the performance of that system. The Second goal is to propose a VGI-based public transport conceptual framework. in this paper in the first part capabilities of VGI is explored, and areas of public transport that can utilize the public involvement is assessed and classified. Then, by surveying the related works in this context, a classification based on the models of participation is provided. Finally, a VGI-based conceptual framework for organizing a public participation for performance measurement of urban public transport for Tehran city is proposed. Results of this paper show that utilizing VGI presents an efficient solution for public transport problems.