In–Vehicle Positioning for Public Transit Using BLE Beacons

Public transit has been affected disproportionately by the social distancing requirements consequent to the COVID-19 pandemic. Technologies such as effortless ticketing and crowdedness assessment have the potential to increase safety and instill confidence for transit users. One key component of these technologies is the ability to detect the presence of a passenger inside a bus vehicle, as well as their approximate location within the vehicle. We present a preliminary study demonstrating the potential of a system that uses Bluetooth Low Energy (beacons), placed inside a vehicle, to localize a passenger within the length of the vehicle with an accuracy better than 1 meter. Based on these preliminary results, we are working on a long-term experiment that will collect RSSI data from BLE beacons (as well as GPS and inertial data) from passengers using the transit system of our campus