Read more about the project on UCSC Baskin Engineering's website here.

The Problem

Depending on the time of day, there are often either not enough or too many buses operating. If a bus is crammed full or almost empty, resources like time, fuel, and money are not utilized as well as they could have been. An abnormal amount of buses can lead to stressed drivers, increased traffic, and late passengers.

The Process

As a part of the engineering design life cycle, my group went through the stages of: need identification, problem definition, conceptualization, preliminary design, detailed design, prototyping, evaluation, and delivery.

The Solution

Bus Usage Monitoring can provide useful information to allow operators (e.g., UC Santa Cruz Transportation and Parking Services) to make data-driven decisions as to when buses should be deployed, and how many buses ought to be deployed to best serve the passenger community.

Conclusion

A result of this project was a functional prototype, involving a raspberry pi and a wifi adapter, that can accurately estimate the number of people in the area.

Usage monitoring through wifi probing is an idea that can also be utilized by different forms of public transportation and other businesses that would benefit from population tracking/counting. In the future, I'd like to look into the possibilities of expanding this project and improving its accuracy by only counting certain types of devices.