WiFi Scanner Technologies for Obtaining Travel Data about Circulator Bus Passengers: Case Study in Obuse, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

Abstract

Recently, a variety of technologies, such as the development of Bluetooth, WiFi, and smart cards, have been used to investigate the movements of passengers or vehicles. This study describes the use of a WiFi scanner that was installed on a bus and circulated around the bus’s route 14 times. The method presented here involves the use of WiFi and GPS to analyze passengers’ movements while the bus is running and while stopped at a bus stop. Nine steps were used to derive travel data from the raw data to estimate the number of movements of the passengers. The results of this study describe the travel data collected between bus stops no. 1 and no. 9 and compare the observer data with the WiFi data.