Study On The Method Of Measuring The Passenger Load Factor For Expressway Passenger Cars Travel

With the construction of China’s expressway into a network and the continued rise in the number of passenger cars,expressway passenger cars travel has been clearly in the main position.According to statistics,the proportion of passenger cars in passenger vehicle traffic on the national expressway is 98.32% in 2022.However,the non-operating passenger travel,mainly passenger cars,are limited due to the lack of in-depth research on the passenger load factor of expressway passenger cars travel.Therefore,it is essential for this paper to study the method of measuring the passenger load factor of expressway passenger cars travel.This paper also aims to effectively calculate the number of passenger trips made by passenger cars on the expressway by relying on the expressway network toll collection system.This paper proposes a method to measure the passenger load factor of expressway passenger cars travel based on ETC gantry images.Firstly,based on the expressway passenger cars travel sample survey data from 2014 to 2022,analysing the variability of expressway passenger cars ridership in the temporal and spatial dimensions respectively using descriptive statistics and paired-samples T-tests with python calls to the Gaode Map API geography/inverse geocoding.Secondly,the correlation between the percentage of passengers carried in an expressway passenger cars with the average number of occupants and the relationship between the presence of a passenger in an expressway passenger cars with the average number of occupants using Pearson’s correlation coefficient,based on a sample of passenger cars at 227 toll stations;based on the ETC gantry image data,the YOLO-V3 target detection algorithm in image recognition is applied to train an expressway passenger cars front passenger detection model;combined with the expressway toll station sampling data,the full probability formula is applied to construct a method for measuring the passenger load factor of expressway passenger cars,and the research is verified at the Hancheng toll station in Xi’an.Finally,the example measurement using Guizhou Province as an example,using SQL Server traffic query to select ETC gantry image data of sections with high traffic of Type Ⅰ buses and typical traffic flow on national expressways in Guizhou Province combined with sample survey data,and calculate the passenger load factor of expressway passenger cars in Guizhou Province in 2022 by weighted average of Type Ⅰ bus traffic volume use the expressway network toll data.The actual case measured the passenger load factor for expressway passenger cars travel in Guizhou Province in 2022 to be 2.3524 persons/vehicle and the number of passenger cars travel volume of 478.990 million people.The results of the study show that passenger cars travel across provinces,regional economic levels,holidays and toll-free policies all have a significant impact on the number of passengers travel in passenger cars on expressways.Determining whether the front passenger side of a passenger cars is occupied is a key factor affecting the number of passengers on an expressway passenger cars.The passenger cars front passenger detection model trained with the YOLO-V3 algorithm has an accuracy rate(mAP)of over 95% and a detection speed(FPS)of 20.83 frames per second for the detection of passenger cars front passengers in ETC gantry images,which meets the needs of practical applications.The proposed method for measuring the passenger load factor for expressway passenger cars travel was validated at the Hancheng toll station in Xi’an with a relative error of 3.08%.