Assessing Driving Behavior in Public Transportation Through Mobile Crowd Sensing: A Concept Proposal for Macau Public Transportation System Fei Chun MA Faculty of Creative Industries, University of St. Joseph, Macau S.A.R., China ma.fei.chun@usj.edu.mo Sok Hán TÓNG Fans Club Lotus Macao Macau S.A.R., China tongsokhan@lotus.org.mo João Cordeiro Faculty of Creative Industries, University of St. Joseph, Macau S.A.R., China Portuguese Catholic University, Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts, School of Arts, Porto, Portugal joao.cordeiro@usj.edu.mo Abstract—This paper introduces a concept proposal for accessing driving behavior in public transportation through Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS), as part of a long-term research project on Advanced Public Transportation System (APTS). The proposed concept makes use of mobile device’s accelerometer and passengers’ qualitative evaluation to identify aggressive driving behavior, which is believed to be a major factor for unnecessary accidents and fuel consumption. A survey and comparison of IT services (mobile applications and websites) provided by Macau Government and private bus companies in Macau, regarding bus-related information, such as fares, routes and route diversions is also provided. Keywords—driving behavior; advanced public transportation systems; mobile device accelerometer; crowdsourcing; mobile crowd sensing. I. INTRODUCTION Macau is a special administrative region in China with an area of about 30.3 sq. km and population reaching 636,200 as at 2014 [1]. The road length in Macau is very limited with about 424.1 km long in 2014 [1]. Thus, the usual transit distance in Macau can be considered as short. The available public land transportation system in Macau consists of bus, pedicab, taxi and casino shuttle bus, with the bus being the most popular. Additionally, Macau has approximately 115,201 cars and 124,906 motorcycles running around as at 2014 [2], which leads Macau into a scenario of heavy traffic congestion and results in long traveling time inside overcrowded bus. Since this problem of traffic jam is increasing, Macau Government is devising some solutions, which include, for example, the construction of a Light Rail Transit (LTR). However, it is safe to argue that even after the conclusion of LTR, buses will continue to be one of the main transportations systems and bad traffic conditions will continue to promote conflicts between bus driver and passenger, which are usually caused by the following situations: • Overcrowded buses; • High congestion rates; • Disruptive bus passengers [3]; • Bad behavior or inexperienced bus drivers [4]. The term Advanced Public Transportation System (APTS) was firstly coined by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) in 1991 [5]. The goal of APTS is to achieve significantly improve the users’ satisfactory level in public transports using Information Technology (IT). A case study using APTS to increase efficiency of bus transport is given in [6]. In Macau, there are two bus information platforms for the public, namely the Public Bus Information Station [7] and MacauPublicBus [8]. The Public Bus Information Station is developed by the Transport Bureau of the Macao Special Administrative Region while the MacauPublicBus is developed by the two private bus companies operating in Macau, TCM 1 and New Era 2 . The provided information is meant to be helpful to the public, by providing a set of electronic-information described in section II. However, safety is also a very important factor in public transportation satisfaction. One factor directly related to the safety of the bus transit is the driving behavior of bus drivers, as bad driving behavior can be the cause of unnecessary accidents. Besides, good driving behavior can also improve fuel consumption and can help establishing a green environment by lowering air pollution from engine emission [9]. Therefore, it is useful to collect data of the driving behavior and we hypothesize that one effective way to do it is through bus passengers, by means of crowdsourcing, using their mobile device (smartphones, smartwatches and tablets) as part of a large-scale sensor network. This hypothesis is further described in section V. This paper is organized as follows: it starts with an survey and comparison between two bus electronic-information platforms in Macau, followed by an overview of the concept of crowdsourcing and mobile device accelerometer technology. Then, a concept application for data collection of driving 1 TCM website: http://tcm.com.mo/ev/ 2 New Era website: http://www.newera.com.mo/EV/ 2016 10th International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing 978-1-5090-0984-8/16 $31.00 © 2016 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IMIS.2016.63 267