Public transit has suffered disproportionally from loss of ridership due to the COVID-19 pandemic. New technology is called for to ensure that passengers feel safe while riding a bus vehicle or a train cart. This project will address two interconnected services that will contribute to a safe travel experience: effortless ticketing and crowdedness monitoring. By effortless (or implicit) ticketing, methods will be developed that enable payment of the correct fare as triggered by the mere presence of the user inside the vehicle. Effortless ticketing removes the need to physically approach a validation point, thereby eliminating 'accumulation points' of social proximity, which may slow the flow of passengers entering the vehicle and thus increase boarding times. Crowdedness monitoring consists of techniques for the real-time assessment of the number and distribution of passengers in a bus vehicle or a train cart. This information may allow passengers awaiting at a bus stop or train station whether to board the upcoming vehicle, or, if they determine that the vehicle is too crowded for their comfort level, wait for the next one, or use a different means of transportation.

The same mechanism that enables effortless ticketing can be used for assessing and tracking the distribution of passengers in a vehicle. This project will use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons as the underlying technology for both services considered. This Smart & Connected Community Planning Grant will focus on a crowdsourced data collection exercise that will be conducted in the University of California at Santa Cruz campus. Participating students, while using the free campus shuttles in their daily routine, will run a smartphone app, developed as part of this project, that will record data from in-vehicle BLE beacons, as well as inertial and GPS data. This annotated data set, which will be openly available to other researchers, will be instrumental for the future development of BLE-based effortless ticketing and crowdedness monitoring.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.