Urban Traffic Monitoring

Urban Traffic Monitoring with the Help of Bus Riders

Pengfei Zhou, Shiqi Jiang and Mo Li

School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University

{pfzhou, sjiang004, limo}@ntu.edu.sg

Abstract—Real-time urban traffic conditions are critical to

wide populations in the city and serve the needs of many

transportation dependent applications. This paper presents our

experience of building a participatory urban traffic monitoring

system that exploits the power of bus riders’ mobile phones. The

system takes lightweight sensor hints and collects minimum set of

cellular data from the bus riders’ mobile phones. Based on such

a participatory sensing framework, the system turns buses into

dummy probes, monitors their travel statuses, and derives the

instant traffic map of the city. Unlike previous works that rely

on intrusive detection or full cooperation from “probe vehicles”,

our approach resorts to the crowd-participation of ordinary bus

riders, who are the information source providers and major

consumers of the final traffic output. The experiment results

demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach achieving finegrained traffic estimation with modest sensing and computation

overhead at the crowd.

I. I NTRODUCTION

Real time urban traffic information is critical to wide populations living in the city. Comprehensive knowledge of instant

urban traffic conditions contributes to commuter’s better travel

planning, improved urban transportation and commuting efficiency, reduced road congestion and waste emission, as well

as other time and cost savings. For the past decades, increasing

efforts have been put into exploring an accurate, efficient,

and inexpensive way to instantly monitor the urban traffic

conditions. Conventional methods rely on intrusive sensing,

where people deploy infrastructural devices like magnetic loop

detectors or traffic cameras at roadsides to actively detect traffic references. Installing such intrusive devices incurs...