Comparison of Bluetooth and Bus GPS Data for Estimating Arterial Travel Time and Trip Chaining

Travel time comparisons between different modes are important information which assist road users in decisions regarding mode choice and route planning. Bluetooth MAC address matching is one of the most established and cost effective techniques for estimating travel times in a corridor, but it does not yield satisfactory results when the sample penetration is poor. The inability to filter out outliers such as trip chaining vehicles is also another potential limitation. This paper discusses two different data collection techniques to compute and compare the travel time and reliability across three different modes (surface route, city buses and metro) on a 4.7mi (7.7 km) arterial stretch in Chennai, India. Bluetooth MAC address matching was used to compute the travel time on the surface routes and data from GPS devices installed on 41 local city buses was used to compute the bus travel time. Travel time on the metro was approximated based on the scheduled service. This study also presents a method to remove bus stop dwell time from the GPS bus data to approximate the surface street travel time. This data was also used to identify those trip chaining surface street vehicles captured by the Bluetooth data. The results confirm that the GPS data from transit has the potential to provide fairly accurate travel times for the corridor.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ30 Standing Committee on Urban Transportation Data and Information Systems.
• Authors:
  • Sakhare, Rahul
  • Mathew, Jijo K
  • Avr, Azhagan
  • Hubbard, Sarah M
  • Devi, Lelitha
  • Bullock, Darcy M
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 10p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Arterial highways; Bluetooth technology; Bus transit; Data analysis; Global Positioning System; Travel time; Trip chaining
• Geographic Terms: Chennai (India)
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01659925
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-01695
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 13 2018 9:52AM