Estimating Bus Loads and OD Flows Using Location-Stamped Farebox and Wi-Fi Signal Data

Abstract EN

Electronic fareboxes integrated with Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems can provide location-stamped records to infer passenger boarding at individual stops.

However, bus loads and Origin-Destination (OD) flows, which are useful for route planning, design, and real-time controls, cannot be derived directly from farebox data.

Recently, Wi-Fi sensors have been used to collect passenger OD flow information.

But the data are insufficient to capture the variation of passenger demand across bus trips.

In this study, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian model to estimate trip-level OD flow matrices and a period-level OD flow matrix using sampled OD flow data collected by Wi-Fi sensors and boarding data provided by fareboxes.

Bus loads on each bus trip are derived directly from the estimated trip-level OD flow matrices.

The proposed method is evaluated empirically on an operational bus route and the results demonstrate that it provides good and detailed transit route-level passenger demand information by combining farebox and Wi-Fi signal data.