PARSON has been developed by a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, traffic planners and operators to improve quality and efficiency service for public transport users. Achieving this requires a reliable source of information about passenger behavior and numbers. In the past, detailed information was obtained using very cost intensive face-to-face interviewing techniques, which then had to be laboriously collated and analyzed to obtain the necessary statistics upon which judgments were made about further development of the public transport network. With the advent of Bluetooth technology and the widespread use of mobile telephones throughout the population it was realized that these combined technologies could potentially be utilized to supply a continuous, up-to-date stream of highly detailedinformation about passenger behavior.
Abstract