Technology based surveys on public transport are rare due to lack of technology uptake in the field. However, the ‘SAHASARA’ pilot project has provided a full year’s Electronic Ticket Machine (ETM) data from 350 buses operating on 48 routes along two corridors - Dumbara and Denuvera- serving the city of Kandy. The Dumbara corridor operates27 routes with the longest route being 46.1 km, while the Denuvera corridor operates 21 routes with the longest route being 29.7 km [1]. The primary objective of this research is to investigate if the Sahasara ETM data can be used for bus route re-planning also called route rationalising [2]. Route re-planning would investigate a number of potential changes to service routes in a bus network. These could range from new routes to route extensions and route mergers. The ETM data has an inherent limitation in that it can only be used for route mergers since ticket data is only for individual bus trips. Route mergers are when two routes that terminate at a common terminal are spliced together to operate as a through route. This usually results in two arterial routes becoming a cross town route, thus serving two corridors without terminating in the city Centre. The use of Smart Cards which can provide entire trip details are much more versatile for a wider range of route re-planning efforts that can achieve several outcomes such as reducing passenger travel time and cost, reducing passenger transfers and transfer time as well as reducing bus operational time and distance, thereby increasing bus productivity [3]. However, proposing suitable routes for mergers requires identifying routes that have compatible demand and revenue profiles as well as supply characteristics so that issues arising in route merging can be minimized. The latter is important since in Sri Lanka the private buses are provided by individual small-scale operators on permissions that entitle then to collect the daily revenue while meeting operating expenses thereof [4].

Nallaperuma, K.P., & Kumarage, A.S. (2018). Identifying the potential for bus route mergers using electronic ticketing data [Extended Abstract]. In T.L. Gunaruwan (Ed.), Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Research for Transport and Logistics Industry 2018 (pp. 59-63). Sri Lanka Society of Transport and Logistics.