SCC-PG Improving the Safety and Appeal of Public Transit in COVID-19 Times

由于新冠肺炎疫情，公共交通遭受了不成比例的乘客流失。需要新的技术来确保乘客在乘坐公交车或火车大车时感到安全。该项目将解决两项相互关联的服务，这两项服务将有助于安全的旅行体验：轻松售票和拥挤监测。通过毫不费力(或隐含的)售票，将开发出能够支付仅由车内用户在场触发的正确车费的方法。轻松售票消除了物理上接近验证点的需要，从而消除了社会接近的“聚集点”，这可能会减缓进入车辆的乘客流，从而增加登车时间。拥挤监测包括实时评估公交车或火车车厢内乘客数量和分布的技术。该信息可以允许乘客在公共汽车站或火车站等待是否登上即将到来的车辆，或者，如果他们确定车辆太拥挤而不能达到他们的舒适水平，则等待下一辆车，或者使用不同的交通工具。实现轻松售票的相同机制可以用于评估和跟踪乘客在车辆中的分布。该项目将使用蓝牙低能量(BLE)信标作为这两种服务的底层技术。这项智能互联社区规划助学金将重点放在加州大学圣克鲁斯分校的众包数据收集活动上。参与的学生在日常生活中使用免费的校园班车时，将运行一款智能手机应用程序，该应用程序是作为该项目的一部分开发的，它将记录车载BLE信标的数据，以及惯性和GPS数据。这个带注释的数据集将向其他研究人员开放，将有助于基于BLE的轻松售票和拥挤监控的未来发展。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.