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In 2004 Clear Channel requested CUENDE Infometrics to design and develop a Bus Audience System for their advertising networks. The project is sponsored by Clear Channel, and the results obtained are integrated in Geomex and shared with all users.
The opportunity that a person can see a bus depends upon the time of that person being on a specific street block (also known as stretch) and the bus passing through that same stretch at the same time. The concept of the research must be very easy to understand and so it is, even though the development has been very complex. When the coincidence between bus and individual exist in time and space, then a visibility analysis should be taken to check if there is an opportunity to see (an impact).
These simple concepts generate a very hard and difficult process to calculate since there are a lot of new issues such as the variations on bus time schedule or the lack of accuracy in time for individual journeys. The first step was to obtain the movements and journeys of the population of a city, including the “metropolitan area”, that is, suburbs, influence zone and other towns near the main city. This area is composed of 39 towns and is a population of 2,989,046 (aged 14-75 years) although TMB buses only transit in Barcelona city. Sample size is 4,238. The information was obtained from the Geomex study. This gives a precise description of each journey, street by street, and with the transportation means used and starting time and duration.
The bus information was the next step. Thanks to the TMB collaboration in this project CUENDE Infometrics obtained precise data based on the GPS installed in each bus for tracking purposes. After obtaining two main databases (journeys and bus movements), the coincidence of individual and bus in the same extent of the street and at the same time has to be calculated. When this coincidence exists an opportunity to see each panel of the bus based on the orientation, size, and type of transport is also calculated. This would be a definition of an impact. Gathering all impact data for each individual, in each journey will provide audience information. This is not different from the “static audience information” and because it is based in the same sample it is easily integrated for “Reach/Cover” calculation of mixed (“static” and “bus”) panels. Bus audience is then included in the Geomex system, so bus network data appears in standard reports and tables.
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Bus Data
We need to know where and when each bus is. TMB has installed a GPS device in each bus. This is a control and tracking device that sends the information of position, speed and time to the center of operations. Also there are specific control points called “maxi-nodes” to check the scheduled time in the course of bus stops. The information gathered was for the last three months. This is a huge amount of data. All this information, as well as timetables, average speed per day and time frame, the geographic position of the bus stops, the identification of buses, lines, starting points and times were given to us for the project under a non-disclosure agreement, due to the confidential nature of the information. We had to work with GPS coordinates to reference them in the same digital maps used by the travel survey. Furthermore we had to develop a new algorithm for “compacting” GPS information of the 198 lines, 810 buses, 1575 panels and 73,783 routes in a standard week, and taking into account the variations from the average. CUENDE Infometricshad generated a database with more than 500,000,0000 records. CUENDE Infometrics had to calculate the precise time when a bus enters a street block and the period of time the bus remains in that segment. This is done for all buses, all lines, second by second, in a standard week.
People Data
The information of people movements in the city and surrounding area was obtained from Geomex. The data for each individual included a precise description in a digital map of the journeys in the last week, the start time, the duration, the length, and the transports used in the journey. For Barcelona we gathered 4,238 interviews, 49,287 journeys and 867,500 street blocks (stretches). But like it´s imposible to know the precise moment when an individual enters in the stretch nor the time he remains in each stretch. So, the information had to be estimated.
Opportunity to see
Once the intersection possibility is calculated, the next step is to determine if the individual is able to see the advertising panels on the bus. The technical committee had to make some assumptions to develop that point. The first assumption is that half of the people are walking on each side of the street. The accuracy on the description of the journey does not give what side of the street is being walked on (it gives the orientation but not the side), so it is so hard and expensive to measure that point where we agreed that half was on each side. The other issue was the legibility distance, in this case, the Geomex visibility criteria based on panel size has been used to determine the legibility area.
The analysis for the opportunity to see is divided in different cases based on the direction of the movement of the individual vs. the bus, on the side of the street and in the transportation means.
External links
--CUENDE Infometrics 14:24, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
