Analysis of Vehicular Travel Time along the Urban Corridor Using Bluetooth Based Data

There has been a tremendous increase in vehicular growth in the last few decades, which has increased congestion in urban areas. Travel time is one of the measures to understand the congestion levels of the urban corridors. The increased use of Bluetooth devices by vehicular drivers may enable the dynamic data collection of travel time through Bluetooth sensors in urban areas. In this context, the objective of the present study is to evaluate the travel time of vehicles using Bluetooth devices and check the reliability of this Bluetooth technology for traffic studies. To fulfil the stated objective, a Bluetooth application was installed on a smartphone in order to collect the vehicular travel time on a selected corridor. A video camera was setup for traffic data collection at a mid-block section, which is used for the validation of the collected travel time data. The K nearest neighbor (KNN) model was developed with travel time (TT) data. The average TT of cars and other vehicles is estimated and found to be higher in the evening compared to the morning. From the developed KNN model, it is also found that the predicted TT for the next time intervals shows that they follow the trend of the actual travel time data obtained from the Bluetooth app. From the results of this study, it is feasible to estimate the travel time in urban areas using Bluetooth devices, which is useful for engineers and planners for suitable policy decision.