This post is also available in: Deutsch (German)
This article lists the many possible people counting options that public transport operators have for counting the number of passengers in public transport.
People counting is a system of people counters and a people counting software used for measuring the number of people passing through a certain location.
There are many different purposes for people counting, with the most commonly-discussed purpose being gathering and analysing customer traffic data for businesses to gain insights for sales, marketing and budgeting decisions.
For example, people counting sensors are placed strategically in brick-and-mortar retail stores to count every shopper who enters and leaves a store as well as their movements around the store. Such data compiled in a people counting software can be used to determine how well the store is performing.
People counting is also referred to as footfall counting, visitor counting, customer counting or door counting, but for this article, we will just refer to it as people counting since we aim to discuss how the number of people is recorded to report the occupancy levels in an area.
Seeing that transport hubs like train stations and airports are among the busiest places in the world, it makes sense to use people counting technology with the highest possible accuracy in public transport.
The issue of congestion in public transport, especially with the need for social distancing, has called for a data-driven solution. Knowing that occupancy data can help passengers follow social distancing rules in public transport, this article is focusing on the use of people counting for public transport occupancy data.
Many of the methods listed in this article are Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) systems, which, of course, automatically record the number of people in public transport vehicles.
Counting can happen at different occurrences:
In different places:
By different units of measurement:
And using different technologies:
Here is an evaluation of the technologies that can possibly be used to count people in public transport.
Cameras with facial recognition capabilities powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) capture sharp visuals of the facial expressions of passengers (maybe they’re cringing about the crowded vehicle).
In Japan, Hitachi and JR East work together to use people flow technology, with special surveillance cameras known as Eki-Shi-Vision, to capture and visually represent occupancy data in JR East’s transport networks and stations. Eki-Shi-Vision is built to only extract people movement data and visually represent people as generic icons to protect their privacy.
These sensors detect bodies via motion, pressure or weight.
Heat or thermal sensors, usually placed on the ceiling, detect the body heat signatures of people walking underneath the sensors using thermal imaging tech, which converts infrared radiation into visible images.
In case you were living under a rock, a Quick Response (QR) code, either printed or digitally shown, is scanned using a mobile device’s QR scanner, using either a QR scanning app or a relevant mobile app with an in-built scanner. Each QR code is linked to a data lake that compiles all the scans of that code.
The possibilities for QR code scanning for payments and attendance tracking are endless, and thus, can be considered as an upgrade to the smart card system (to be discussed next) in public transport.
A smart card is a card that contains a microchip which connects to a card reader either by tapping or using contactless RFID (radio frequency identification) tech. The microchip allows smart cards to store large amounts of data, run on-card functions like encryption and interact with the card reader.
The smart card data, that is the data about the entry and exit of each passenger captured at the station gates, can be referred to as the passenger counter data.
It is exactly what the heading says. Public transport operators can choose to check the data of the total number of tickets sold at their stations to determine the number of passengers in a certain network in a certain time period.
A passenger survey directly asks the passengers to record their observations and experiences, either in a mobile app or an online form.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth beacons count people by sending probe requests to mobile devices they detect nearby. A probe request is like, “Hello! Whoever here has switched on their Wi-Fi or Bluetooth toggles, will you connect with me?”. It’s basically a connection request, to which the device user can decide to accept or reject. The number of probe requests will be considered as the number of passengers. Another way to count using Wi-Fi is to count the devices that are already connected to the Wi-Fi.
This isn’t a technology but it’s still a method used by some public transport operators, whereby a human being like a counting professional or the vehicle driver manually counts the number of passengers entering the vehicle with a tally counter.
A quick Google search for people counting systems shows that there are so many types of people counting systems out there. It also shows that this topic has been widely-studied for many years, even back in 1998. As we can see in the public transport context, the people counting methods can be categorised in two ways: Ticket-related and non-ticket-related.
Should public transport operators count based on ticket sales (tickets, QR code scans or smart card taps) or others (cameras, sensors, signals or employees)? Choosing which method works best for a public transport operator depends on what the operator is taking into account.
One of the things the operators need to consider is that there seems to be a trade-off between insights-driven decisions and privacy concerns. For example, the ability to analyse passengers’ sentiments by identifying who they are and how they behave is seen as creepy while prioritising anonymity means missing out on sentiment insights. At the end of the day, these decisions boil down to what the operator is prioritising.
[Note: Counting the number of people who search routes in an app or a website is not a good way to count passengers because not everyone who searches routes will use those routes, but instead, might just do it for informational purposes. That’s why this method wasn’t included in this article.]
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