Arterial speed studies with taxi equipped with global positioning receivers as probe vehicle

The paper describes a new methodology for performing arterial speed studies using taxis equipped GPS receivers as probe cars. It documents the data collection and data reduction, as well as analyses that illustrate the capabilities of the GPS/GIS methodology. The data collection procedure uses taxis equipped with GPS receivers to automatically collect time, local coordinates, and speed at regular sampling periods, for example every one second. The data reduction procedure filters and aggregates GPS data to compute travel time and speed along highway segments. Finally, the developed methodology is implemented with 100 taxis equipped with GPS receivers of Guangzhou City. The results demonstrate the power of the methodology proposed in this paper on travel time.