Identification of Inelastic Subway Trips Based on Weekly Station Sequence Data: An Example from the Beijing Subway

Urban rail transit has become an indispensable option for Beijing residents. Subway inelastic users (SIUs) are the main component among all users. Understanding the proportion of SIUs and their characteristics is important in developing service promotions and helpful for subway agencies in making marketing policies. This paper proposes a novel and simple identification process for identifying regular subway inelastic trips (SITs) in order to distinguish SITs and non-SITs and extract their characteristics. Weekly station sequence (WSS) is selected as the data-based format, principles of SIUs are discussed and chosen, and the framework of SIT identification is applied to a large weekly sample from the Beijing Subway. A revealed preference (RP) survey and results analysis are undertaken to estimate the performance of the proposed methods. The RP survey validation shows that accuracy reaches as high as 94%, and the distribution analysis of SITs and their origin-destinations (ODs) indicate that the SIT characteristics extracted are consistent with the situation in Beijing. The proportion of SIUs is stable on workdays and is more than 80% during rush hour. The efforts described in this paper can provide subway managers with a useful and convenient method to understand the characteristics of subway passengers and the performance of a subway system.