01479216

Component

The collection and provision of real time information to passengers is a key issue on current cities for both traffic managers and travelers. This paper presents a novel methodology for estimating travel times in dense urban road networks using point-to-point detectors. The aim is to fill in the existing gap related to the weakness of existing travel time estimation methodologies, which take into account point-to-point detector devices. Bluetooth is considered as one of the less expensive technologies for estimating travel times, but while on the one hand travel times data collection can be considered as easy, data filtering and data correction require a demanding methodology, which if not correctly applied may result in inaccurate results as compared to other methods. The main difficulty of data processing is to identify the correct set of MAC addresses for estimating the travel times, especially in dense urban zones, where three main error sources exist: the existence of different modes (private vehicles, pedestrians, buses, bicycle etc.), the existence of more than one possible path between two Bluetooth detector devices and the existence of stops or trips ending between two Bluetooth devices, creating outliers that need to be identified and discarded. The results of the methodology confirm that outliers are eliminated, as shown by a case study involving 10 Bluetooth detectors, installed at major intersections of Thessaloniki’s central business district. The presented methodology is useful for application related to real-time data provision to advanced traveler information services as well as to underlying traffic models.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40(1) Emerging Methods and Developments in Urban Activity and Travel Analysis.

01470560

13-3654

English

14p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Advanced traveler information systems; Bluetooth technology; Detectors; Networks; Real time information; Traffic data; Traffic density; Travel time; Urban areas

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3654

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:43PM