T-SPARK

Table of Contents

Overview

Product
T-SPARK Objective
Transit Service Performance Analysis and Redesign Kit
Role
Designer, Planner, Evaluator
Markets
Transit
Transportation Planning
Fixed-Route Transit
On-Demand Transit
On-Demand Mobility
Performance Analysis
Accessibility Analysis
Coverage Analysis
Equity Analysis
Adjacent Network Analysis
Solutions
Network Redesign
Operations Replanning
On-demand Transit Integration
Strategic Planning

Introduction

Welcome to T-Spark: Transit System Performance Analysis and Redesign Kit!
T-Spark is a powerful, web-based application designed to provide a comprehensive suite of tools for in-depth analysis of surface public transit networks. Whether you are a transit planner, a transportation researcher, or a student, T-Spark offers the tools you need to evaluate, visualize, and gain insights into system performance, coverage, and accessibility of your transit system, almost everything that you need to make informed decisions about the future of an urban transit network.
T-Spark comprises six different tools as follows:

1. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Engine for Relative Route Performance Evaluation: Efficiency and productivity analysis using Data Envelopment Analysis, Malmquist Productivity Index, and traditional absolute performance analysis.
2. Access Analysis: Analyzing accessibility to different critical services within the city.
3. Demographic Analysis: Visualizing socioeconomic attributes for different zones within the city.
4. Coverage Analysis: Catchment area and transit desert identification.
5. Adjacent Network Analysis: Route overlap and adjacency transit service analysis.
6. Performance Evaluation: Spatial display of multi-period efficiency scores, trends, and changes in system performance. The figure below shows T-Spark’s hierarchical workflow, culminating in the alternatives to redesign of an existing transit network to achieve higher performance efficiency.

Figure: T-Spark’s Hierarchical Workflow.

As illustrated, T-SPARK leverages data-driven techniques to provide redesign alternatives for an existing transit network. Data-driven network analysis is a critical initial step in the transit planning problem (whether at the strategic or operational planning levels) and the associated network design problem: if you don't understand where the problems are, what the potential causes might be and what lessons can be learned from effective route operations, the network redesign problem would not fully informed. Do you want to learn more about T-SPARK and explore how it can be applied to your projects? Start with the guide file below. This document walks you through each of the six tools in the T-SPARK toolkit, explaining their purpose, required inputs, and the methodologies behind them (where applicable). A demo video will be added soon, and the source codes will be made available on my GitHub, so you can download and run them on your own system. Enjoy reading the T-SPARK guide file and using it in your projects! If you have any questions, suggestions, or ideas to make T-SPARK even brighter, please don’t hesitate to reach out using the [contact form](/contact/).

Guide File

Demoe video

Coming soon, stay tuned!