Measuring how long passengers wait to depart in minibus taxis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to make two empirical observations. Firstly to observe the queueing of minibus taxi vehicles at a loading bay waiting to reach the platform where passengers board. Secondly, the paper measures the in-vehicle waiting times of passengers waiting for the minibus taxi to fill-up and depart. Both of these observations are made through an application of principles adapted from queuing theory and linear regression. Data collection included 28 minibus taxi vehicle observations, and 365 (n=337) passenger boarding times for a minibus taxi route between a popular shopping complex in Mmabatho and the Central Business District of Mahikeng. It is found that the average waiting time to depart is much closer to 3 minutes for passengers ̶ which is the headway for these operations. But for the minibus taxi vehicles, they cumulatively spend nearly 60 minutes to reach the boarding bay again. Little over 20% of the sample of passenger observations wait for less than a minute for to depart and 90% wait for at most 5 minutes for the taxi to depart. From the regression analysis coefficients reveal that at a 95% confidence level, the time in the system is a statistically significant and inversely proportional determinant of when a passenger should be boarding a taxi. The study is limited only to “waiting time” and does not include the total travel time. More applications of these types of processes are recommended for paratransit research.