Lessons learned using wi-fi and Bluetooth as means to monitor public service usage

Facets of urban public transport such as occupancy, waiting times, route preferences are essential to help deliver improved services as well as better information for passengers to plan their daily travel. The ability to automatically estimate passenger occupancy in near real-time throughout cities will be a step change in the way public service usage is currently estimated and provide significant insights to decision makers. The ever-increasing popularity and abundance of mobile devices with always-on Wi-Fi/Bluetooth interfaces makes Wi-Fi/Bluetooth sensing a promising approach for estimating passenger load. In this paper, we present a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth sensing system to detect mobile devices for estimating passenger counts using public transport. We present our findings on an initial set of experiments on a series of bus/tram journeys encapsulating different scenarios over five days in a UK metropolitan area. Our initial experiments show promising results and we present our plans for future large-scale experiments.