The use of gis in the study of bus lines the case of Lisbon and Oporto metropolitan areas

The passenger’s transport system plays a vital role in providing all citizens and visitors the access to a set of locations and facilities. Thus, in Portugal, one of the most important ways of public transport it’s the bus. It is crucial to have a more detailed knowledge of the bus transport system, in order to have better services. It’s common sense that bus routes tend to cluster in urban areas, but many times it is difficult to identify precisely which zone has a higher or lower concentration of bus lines. The identification of bus lines concentration areas may serve as support to planners and decision makers to a more informed management and planning of the bus transportation systems. In this sense the focus of this article is to develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) based methodology in order to identify and rank bus lines concentration areas. The working is illustrated using 2013 SIGGESC (Sistema de Informação Geográfica de Gestão de Carreiras) bus lines database, for the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Oporto. SIGGESC is a spatial decision support system (SDSS), based on a GIS, directed towards the public transportation sector. This SDSS contributes to a paradigm shift at the Portuguese Transportation Authority (IMT) in terms of the process of registering and granting concessions to the bus companies, and also increases IMT’s ability in other supervision tasks. It allows a better coordination and planning of bus lines, and contributes to the dematerialization of the licensing processes.