Measuring Bus Passenger Load by Monitoring Wi-Fi Transmissions from Mobile Devices

Uneven loading of busses degrades passengers’ travel experience for a variety of reasons. Load balancing for busses requires information about the load, both the potential passenger load at the bus stop and the actual load currently aboard travelling busses. This paper describes a feasibility study for measuring bus passenger loads by detecting the periodic network probing activity from WiFi devices built into ‘smart phones’. Our experimental results show that WiFi activity does correlate with observed passenger flow at bus stops and the load aboard a bus while en route.