The North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) Ferry Division operates vessels on seven routes along the eastern coast of North Carolina. The routes serve diverse populations, ranging from routes with substantial tourist/visitor customers to routes with primarily daily commuters. Similar to traffic signals on a road network, queuing and waiting are unavoidable at ferry terminals, and wait times and queue lengths are important considerations of customers. However, measuring and communicating wait times and queues is not simple and not currently available to NCDOT ferry customers. The NCDOT Ferry Division would like to implement technology that can reliably measure and track wait times. The objectives of this project was to 1) review and test options for measuring wait times and 2) recommend the implementation of a system to measure and track wait times for installation at ferry terminals.
This research conducted a systematic review of the state-of-the-art of technologies that can be used for measuring wait times. Summary tables were developed with information that can be used by the Ferry Division and other NCDOT staff to understand the advantages and disadvantages of various technologies. Then, this research tested the feasibility of applying BlueTooth and License Plate Recognition (LPR) technologies to track vehicles and estimate waiting times at ferry terminals. Based on a series of tests, this research revealed that the LPR technology has a sampling rate of 84.2 percent; the average capture rate and read rate are 84.3 percent and 87 percent, respectively. The match rate was found to be 79.4 percent, which is significantly higher than the match rate of Bluetooth devices (9 percent). Thus, the LPR technology was recommended for waiting time estimation. Based on field data collected at the busiest ferry terminal in North Carolina, this research found that travelers tended to experience long waiting times during midweek days, particularly during the mid-day period. Additionally, the demand was found to be the primary factor for wait times during the mid-day peak period, and travelers’ arrival time in terms of proximity to the scheduled ferry departure time was recognized as the key factor for waiting time during early morning and later evening non-peak periods.
