Case Study: OC Transpo Bus achieves around 90% origin–destination estimation accuracy with SMATS Traffic Solutions

Transit Passengers Origin-Destination Estimation using SMATS Bluetooth and WiFi Sensors

OC Transpo Bus faced the challenge of reducing congestion and improving transit service by better understanding passenger origins and destinations across Ottawa, where traffic congestion ranked high and reliable transit is needed to shift travelers from private cars. To address this, OC Transpo Bus partnered with SMATS Traffic Solutions and deployed SMATS’ TrafficBox™ portable Wi‑Fi and Bluetooth sensors to passively and anonymously capture device signals, timestamps and GPS data.

SMATS Traffic Solutions placed a TrafficBox™ on Route 87 — Baseline during evening peak hours (4:00 PM–5:30 PM) for six days, syncing 1‑second GPS and signal data to the cloud; they cleaned noisy data, applied clustering and filtering algorithms, and extracted features (RSSI averages/variance, detections, travel time/distance) to separate passengers from non‑passengers. The SMATS solution produced an average sample rate of ~20% versus manual counts and estimated origin–destination pairs with about 90% accuracy, giving OC Transpo Bus actionable OD insights to optimize operations and planning.

OC Transpo Bus