Caliper Staff Receive the First TRB Award for the Outstanding Research Paper in Public Transportation

NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS (USA) – A paper reporting on a Caliper project for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New York City Transit (NYCT) was selected as the first recipient of a new award established by the Transportation Research Board Public Transportation Group Executive Board for the Outstanding Research Paper published in conjunction with the 2009 Annual Meeting.  The award was presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting in January.

The paper, Using Entry-Only Automatic Fare Collection Data to Estimate Linked Transit Trips in New York City, was authored by Robert Freimer and Howard Slavin of Caliper and James Barry, formerly of New York City Transit. The paper is published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board No. 2112, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington D.C., 2009, pp. 53-61.

The goal of this project, which was completed several years ago, was to create software that extracts transit trip information from New York City Transit’s MetroCard AFC system and combine it with other NYCT datasets to create tables of geo-located linked passenger trips.  TransCAD serves as the basis for all of the data management and data processing of the transit data.  In addition, a user-friendly custom TransCAD application, developed for this project, allows the trips to be queried, exported, summarized and/or visualized.  This includes the ability to create inputs for NYCT’s Operations Planning Department transit trip assignment model and to examine origin and destination patterns and trip length distributions of riders by individual routes for NYCT’s Office of Management and Budget. The system created, which is a custom application of TransCAD, efficiently handles the more than seven million transactions logged each day on the New York City Transit system

About Caliper:

Caliper Corporation is a leading developer of transportation and Geographic Information System (GIS) software. Caliper GIS mapping software is used by more than 70,000 users in over 70 countries.