Understanding the variability in station stop times

The understanding and management of station stops continues to be a key issue in the operation of urban railways. Further to the recent re-working of an international dataset to provide global estimates of passenger alighting and boarding rates, this paper disaggregates these by type of railway and geographical context. These disaggregations demonstrate interesting variations reflecting plausible hypotheses about differences in passenger flow resulting from local circumstances and present a range of data for use by other researchers. Nevertheless, the preferred models generally demonstrate passenger alighting rates to be most significantly affected by the number of alighters, vestibule load/capacity and the number of doors per carriage, while the most statistically significant variables determining passenger boarding rates are the number of boarders, the vestibule load (passengers who neither alight nor board), platform width and vestibule size.