ANALYSIS OF LOW-COST BLUETOOTH-PLUS-WIFI DEVICE FOR TRAVEL TIME RESEARCH

MOTIVATION • Collecting real-time travel data via intelligent transportation systems (ITS) rely heavily on technologies that are expensive and challenging to maintain. • Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are the most popular low-cost communication protocols that can give a good understanding of spatial and temporal nature of travel. USEFULNESS: This will be important for two main reasons: • Allow research to be conducted in a cost effective manner on all types of facilities. • Offers the opportunity to undertake comprehensive empirical studies on link and path travel time distributions especially for arterial roads gBT COMPONENTS AND COST • A unit of the gBT consists of a single board computer (raspberry pi), a power supply, an adjustable antenna, a global positioning system, and a wireless adaptor (Figure 1). • Estimated component cost is about $500 per location compared to about $8,000 for a vendor installed Bluetooth device. CONCLUSION • It was shown that the gBT is viable for determining link travel times. There was an average of 4% deviation of median values with relatively wider variations compared to the GPS data. • There were no statistically significant differences between the mean travel times from both collecting systems. • The theoretical lognormal distribution best fit the travel time data from both devices