Monitoring the Spatial and Temporal Evolution of a Network's Traffic Conditions with a Bus-GPS Based Pseudo Detection System

In view of the high deployment and maintenance costs associated with monitoring urban traffic, this research has proposed a pseudo-detector system using the popular bus-GPS data for monitoring urban traffic conditions. The proposed system views the entire arterial link as a number of sublinks, each functioning as a pseudo detector, and the time-varying bus-GPS information within each pseudo detector as moving sensors. One can then apply convenient algorithms to process such data, and produce the temporal and spatial traffic conditions over the link. Since bus GPS data contain the route number information, the data map matching process can be more efficient and more reliable to be applied in real-time operation. It also enables the proposed system to yield the movement-specific link speed information that can be used to estimate travel time by route and by movement at an intersection and for traffic agencies to design of signal progression for both through and turning movements. A case study with field data from the city of Chongqing, China has supported the potential of the proposed GPS-based pseudo traffic detecting system for real-world applications.