Wireless detection of end-to-end passenger trips on public transport buses

An important problem in creating efficient public transport systems is obtaining data about the set of trips that passengers make, usually referred to as an Origin/Destination (OD) matrix. Obtaining this data is problematic and expensive in general, especially in the case of buses because on-board ticketing systems do not record where and when passengers get off a bus. In this paper we describe a novel and inexpensive wireless system that uses off-the-shelf Bluetooth hardware to wirelessly detect and record end-to-end passenger journeys.