Passengers at 54 London Tube stations were enabling Transport for London (TfL) to get a better understanding of how and where to engage with them, thanks to a month-long data gathering trial that launched late November.
London station passengers make 31m journeys each day – effectively, a vast advertising audience in motion. But detailed insight on when to market to them once they are on the platform – ie. beyond the entrance collection of aggregated and de-personalised data via Oyster and Contactless payments – has been locked in inefficient and costly paper surveys of the past.
By picking up WiFi connection requests from passengers’ mobile devices as they pass through stations, TfL says it will learn how people move through and change services and where bottlenecks occur, enabling more efficient travels around the system.
The information can also result in increasing revenue from companies who advertise on poster sites or rent retail units – revenue to reinvest into improving and upgrading services across London.
Sue Daley, head of Big Data, Cloud & Mobile at techUK, said: “TfL is unlocking the power of data to gain insights into how passengers are using the network and drive its transformation into a smart transport system.
“The availability of big data analytics tools and technologies means that organisations, of all sizes and sectors, are increasingly able to make data driven decisions that can make a real difference to customers’ lives. In this case, it will mean more accurate passenger insights and easier journeys for customers.”
Data gathering and de-personalising
When a device is WiFi-enabled, it searches for a WiFi network by sending out a unique identifier to nearby routers – known as a Media Access Control (MAC) address. Posters at stations are informing people about the trial and TfL says all data will be automatically de-personalised so that individuals cannot be identified, with no data being made available to third parties and no browsing data collected. However, passengers can opt out by turning off their WiFi while passing through stations.
Shashi Verma, chief technology officer at Transport for London, said: “This short trial will help us understand whether WiFi connection data could help us plan and operate our transport network more effectively for customers. Historically, if we wanted to know how people travelled we would have to rely on paper surveys and manual counting, which is expensive, time consuming and limited in detail and reliability. We hope the results of this trial will enable us to provide customers with even better information for journey planning and avoiding congestion.”
TfL’s collection of ‘pseudonimised’ Wi-Fi data has been discussed with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office and follows its published guidelines.
TfL carried out customer research to test the proposal through a qualitative research exercise and overall feedback from focus groups was positive. Earlier this year, TfL also carried out a two-day modelling trial to understand whether this method of data collection was possible.
