Analysis of Pedestrian Travel with Static Bluetooth Sensors

Abstract

Travel evaluation metrics have been historically biased toward motorized modes, which dominate land transportation choices and are partially responsible for numerous environmental and health issues facing society today. Encouraging active travel solutions is seen as a means of improving the sustainability, health, and cohesiveness of a community. Unfortunately, information about volume, trip origin and destination, travel time, and personal interactions is difficult to obtain because of a lack of sensor infrastructure and unrestricted movement of these modes. Therefore, information is often limited to annual surveys and model estimates that are insufficient to address the increasing needs of sustainable planning and large-scale behavior studies. An automated, cost-effective approach to acquiring pedestrian data is desirable. The emergence of Bluetooth sensors as a means of gathering travel time data for traffic analysis presents an opportunity to use the same technology for pedestrian travel analysis. However, because people generally carry more Bluetooth devices in their vehicles than they do on their person, making representative sample sizes is a challenge. A study of pedestrian detection with Bluetooth technology is presented at two sites (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Seattle, Washington) to investigate the feasibility of Bluetooth technology for pedestrian studies. The results indicate that, given sufficient populations, high-level trend analysis can provide insights into pedestrian travel behavior.