Bus Passenger Volume and Origin-Destination Based on Field Surveys Using a Wi-Fi Scanner

Currently, transport survey methods are very diverse. Transportation data retrieval using information technology, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and smartcards, is prominent. This study aims to obtain media access control (MAC) addresses of individual bus passengers by using a Wi-Fi scanner. This Wi-Fi scanner is capable of engaging a probe request mode to capture MAC addresses from mobile devices or other Wi-Fi-enabled modalities without connecting to the internet. This study also describes a new data cleaning procedure that is used to characterize bus passenger volume and travel trends using a combination of MAC address and GPS data. The approach developed in the proposed study is capable of producing outputs, such as an origin-destination (OD) matrix and passenger volume for a bus route section. A comparison between passenger volumes obtained from the Wi-Fi data processing procedure and the data obtained using the ground truth procedure indicates the number of passengers determined using the Wi-Fi data acquisition and processing procedure is less than the number of passengers determined using the ground truth procedure.