Sample Survey of Passenger Traffic by Analysing Wi-Fi Data in Moscow Transport Hub. Part 1

Abstract

In modern, rapidly developing cities of the world, building an urban transport model requires traffic data. The lack of those data does not allow making timely management decisions on distribution of passenger flows, namely within transport flows. Currently, there are various methods and systems for counting passenger flows, such as the manual staff counts, survey and counted ticketed entries methods, and various automated technology-based systems. However, those well-known methods have their drawbacks.For this reason, the task to search for alternative methods and data sources for the study of passenger flows remains relevant.This article is based on the updated results of the study recently conducted by the author during preparation of his master’s thesis. During the study and developing previous author’s papers, data on connections of passengers to Wi-Fi routers were chosen as a data source. Since this phase of the study was conducted on the territory of Moscow transport hub, in metro and on Moscow Central Diameters (MCD), where the cars are equipped with great number of Wi-Fi routers, with free connection and Internet access, it has increased the sample Wi-Fi data array significantly.The objective of the study was to study the possibility of processing Wi-Fi data obtained from Wi-Fi scanners as a passenger flow analysis tool.The study has revealed that, on average, up to 40% of passengers in metro and MCD cars on the studied lines use the WI-FI module turned on in their mobile devices.The results of the study have confirmed that Wi-Fi data can be used as a tool for passenger traffic analysis, but at the same time revealed the necessity to integrate them with other data sources, as well as the strong dependence of the result of Wi-Fi data processing on the technical features of the Wi-Fi scanner and its location in the vehicle during experiments. You can find the first part of the article in the issue.