Development of a Mass-Based Automated Passenger Counter

Automatic passenger counters (APCs) provide passenger boarding and alighting information associated with time and location data. They are a standard tool used by many transit authorities to measure and report monthly ridership to the National Transportation Database, with resulting federal subsidies calculated solely based on the data they provide.

The TRB IDEA (Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis) Program's Transit IDEA Final Report 84: Development of a Mass-Based Automated Passenger Counter details the development of an inexpensive passenger counting system that allows simple integration with existing vehicle information systems.

The system relates bus mass to passenger boarding and alighting using pressure transducers located in the air spring suspension system. The system was integrated on four in-use transit buses around the Minneapolis and Saint Paul metropolitan area.

The results showed that, although boarding and alighting event-based algorithms were not accurate, cumulative passenger counting calculations were very accurate. Such total passenger count and mass information could be used in energy management and charge prediction optimization algorithms used for all-electric transit buses in the future.