An Android Smartphone Application for Collecting, Sharing, and Predicting Border Crossing Wait Time

This paper introduces an Android smartphone application called the Toronto Buffalo Border Wait Time (TBBW) app, designed to collect, share and predict waiting time at the three Niagara Frontier border crossings, namely the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, the Rainbow Bridge, and the Peace Bridge. The innovative app offers the user three types of waiting time estimates: (1) current waiting times collected at the crossings; (2) historical waiting times; and (3) future waiting time predicted for the next 15 minutes and updated every five minutes. For the current waiting time, the app can provide both the data collected by border crossing authorities as well as user-reported or “crowd-sourcing” data shared by the community of the app’s users. Reporting of the data could be done either manually or automatically through a GPS tracking function provided by the smartphone. For the historical waiting time, the app provides statistical charts and tables to help users choose the crossing with the likely shortest wait time. Future waiting times are predicted by a real-time stepwise traffic delay prediction model which consists of a short-term traffic volume forecasting model and a multi-server queueing model. To validate the prediction functionality of the app, its predictions were compared against real-world delay measurements for the entire month of May, 2014. The comparison showed that the model offered predictions with a mean absolute difference of 9.22 minutes. When considering only delays that are greater than 10 minutes, the model has a mean absolute difference of only 6.95 minutes. The ability to integrate officially reported delay estimates with crowd-sourcing data, and the ability to provide future border wait times clearly distinguish the TBBW app from others on the market.