Urban Arterial Travel Time Evaluation using Bluetooth Data

Reliable estimation of speed or travel time (TT) of an urban arterial is the fundamental task for better management of the traffic. Traditionally, such data are collected via loop detectors, inductive loops, video cameras, but their installation cost were not always allowed to locate every specific point. Recently, Bluetooth (BT) technology has been widely used as a traffic data source due to the i) low installation cost, and ii) providing continuous data even 24-h period. The principle of BT-based traffic data is simply capturing the timestamped of the unique Media Access Control (MAC) of Bluetooth devices. Detecting the same MAC addresses from multiple different locations enabled to estimate the Origin and Destination (O-D) of the trips and travel time information. This study evaluates the distribution of TT information from different perspectives in which BT-based traffic data were obtained from five consecutive signalized intersections located in Mersin, Turkey during morning peak hours of 07:30-09:30 for the two weekdays. The results indicated that the data had considerable success in estimating travel times and urban traffic monitoring with adequate sampling rates. However, the filtering process must be carefully handled to distinguish the motorized movements from non-motorized ones.