Analytics on public transport delays with spatial big data

The increasing pervasiveness of location-aware technologies is leading to the rise of large, spatio-temporal datasets and to the opportunity of discovering usable knowledge about the behaviors of people and objects. Applied extensively in transportation, spatial big data and its analytics can deliver useful insights on a number of different issues such as congestion, delays, public transport reliability and so on. Predominantly studied for its use in operational management, spatial big data can be used to provide insight in strategic applications as well, from planning and design to evaluation and management. Such large scale, streaming spatial big data can be used in the improvement of public transport, for example the design of public transport networks and reliability. In this paper, we analyze GTFS data from the cities of Stockholm and Rome to gain insight on the sources and factors influencing public transport delays in the cities. The analysis is performed on a combination of GTFS data with data from other sources. The paper points to key issues in the analysis of real time data, driven by the contextual setting in the two cities.