Investigation with Bluetooth Sensors of Bicycle Travel Time Estimation on a Short Corridor

Accurate travel time information acquisition is essential to the effective planning and management of bicycle travel conditions. Traditionally, video camera data have been used as the primary source for measuring the quality of bicycle travel time. This paper deals with an investigation of bicycle travel time estimation on a short corridor, using Bluetooth sensors, based on field survey of travel time at one arterial road in Hangzhou. Usually bicycle travel time estimates with Bluetooth sensors contain three types of errors: spatial error, temporal error, and sampling error. To avoid these, we introduced filters to “purify” the time series. A median filtering algorithm is used to eliminate the outlier observations. The filtering scheme has been applied on Genshan East Road and Moganshan Road. Test data are used to measure the quality of bicycle travel time data collected by the Bluetooth sensors, and the results show that the new technology is a promising method for collecting high-quality travel time data that can be used as ground truth for evaluating other sources of travel time and other intelligent transportation system applications.