Journeys on the London Underground could be improved through harnessing WiFi data to make more information available to customers as they move around London, new research has shown. The four-week pilot organized by Transport for London, which ran between November and December last year, studied how depersonalised WiFi connection data from customers’ mobile devices could be used to better understand how people navigate the London Underground network, allowing TfL to improve the experience for customers.
The pilot focused on 54 stations within Zones 1-4 and saw more than 509 million depersonalised “probing requests”, or pieces of data, collected from 5.6 million mobile devices making around 42 million journeys.
These journeys were analysed by TfL’s in-house analytics team and broken into different aggregated “movement types” to help understand what customers were doing at particular points of their journeys – such as entering or exiting a station, changing between lines or just passing through the station while on a train. By using this data, TfL was able to get a much more accurate understanding of how people move through stations, interchange between services and how crowding develops.
The pilot revealed a number of results that could not have been detected from ticketing data or paper-based surveys. While the usual ticketing data for major interchange stations such as Oxford Circus can show the levels of people entering and exiting the stations, it cannot show the huge numbers of people interchanging during peak hours, or precise local areas where crowding occurs on platforms or around escalators, whereas WiFi data can. For example, analysis showed that customers travelling between King’s Cross St Pancras and Waterloo take at least 18 different routes, with around 40% of customers observed not taking one of the two most popular routes.
The data collected through the WiFi pilot could have a number of benefits for TfL and its customers, including: allowing staff to better inform customers of the best way to avoid disruption or unnecessary crowding; helping customers plan the route that best suits them; enabling greater sophistication in proving real-time information to customers; helping further prioritise transport investment to improve services and address regular congestion points; providing a better insight on customer flows which could increase commercial revenue from companies which advertise or rent retail units on the transport network.
TfL has now begun discussions with key stakeholders, including the Information Commissioner’s Office, privacy campaigners and consumer groups about how this data collection could be undertaken on a permanent basis, possibly across the full Tube network.
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