Validation of Origin-Destination Data from Bluetooth Reidentification and Aerial Observation

Vehicle reidentification with Bluetooth signal data has emerged as an effective and economical means for collecting traffic data including origin-destination (O-D) information, which is crucial for transportation planning. Direct vehicle tracking based on time-lapse aerial photography (TLAP) is also increasingly used for O-D studies. Neither technique has previously been validated, so the objective of this study was to validate O-Ds generated by using both techniques against a ground-truth O-D. Traffic volume-, Bluetooth-, and TLAP-based O-D data collected at an interchange in Madison, Wisconsin, were used in this study. Significant variability (2.3% to 7.2%) in Bluetooth match rates was observed for the 12 O-D pairs of the interchange, which were calculated by using a heuristic measure of the difference between traffic volumes (the GEH formula). Uniproportional scaling of the sample Bluetooth O-D (using the average detection rate) resulted in poor fit to the true O-D, but biproportional factoring (Fratar...