Predicting Bus Arrival Time With Mobile Phone
Public transport, especially the bus transport, has
beenwell developed in many parts of the world. The bustransport services reduce
the private car usage and fuelconsumption, and alleviate traffic congestion. As
one of themost comprehensive and affordable means of public trans-port, in 2011
the bus system serves over 3.3 million busrides every day on average in
Singapore with around 5million residents [1].When traveling with buses, the
travelers usually want toknow the accurate arrival time of the bus. Excessively
longwaiting time at bus stops may drive away the anxious trav-elers and make
them reluctant to take buses. Nowadays,most bus operating companies have been
providing theirtimetables on the web freely available for the travelers. Thebus
timetables, however, only provide very limited infor-mation (e.g., operating
hours, time intervals, etc.), whichare typically not timely updated. Other than
those officialtimetables, many public services (e.g., Google Maps) areprovided
for travelers. Although such services offer usefulinformation, they are far
from satisfactory to the bus trav-elers. For example, the schedule of a bus may
be delayed due to many unpredictable factors (e.g., traffic
conditions,harsh weather situation, etc). The accurate arrival timeof next bus
will allow travelers to take alternative trans-port choices instead, and thus mitigate
their anxiety andimprove their experience. Towards this aim, many commer-cial
bus information providers offer the realtime bus arrivaltime to the public
[17]. Providing such services, however,usually requires the cooperation of the
bus operating com-panies (e.g., installing special location tracking devices
onthe buses), and incurs substantial cost.In this paper, we present a novel bus
arrival time pre-diction system based on crowd-participatory sensing.
Weinterviewed bus passengers on acquiring the bus arrivaltime.
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