Techniques for on-board vibrational passenger comfort monitoring in public transport

Traffic calming devices on urban streets, such as elevated pedestrian crossings, speed bumps and roundabouts, are increasingly used, therefore bus passengers on-board comfort assessment is an actual problem. In order to measure vibrational on-board comfort for public transport standing passengers related to traffic calming, an acquisition system called ASGCM (Autonomous System for Geo-referenced Comfort Measurements) has been developed, taking as a reference the European regulations on rail transports. Thanks to ASGCM, each measurement of vibration, on-ground velocity and acceleration is linked with geographical information resulting from a GPS, so a map of a comfort index, as well as statistical surveys and correlation between on-board comfort and traffic calming, can be directly obtained using a Geographic Information System (GIS), querying a centralized remote database developed ad-hoc. A large number of experimental tests has been performed in order to define a vibrational comfort index and to collect a large statistics that allows a significant comparison between different infrastructures and their characterization. The proposed technique can also be useful for diagnostics purposes, such as vehicles comparison and vehicle and road maintenance state monitoring