Sensors mounted in bus doorways count passengers getting on and off vehicles. Used primarily in a metropolitan area where there are many passengers entering and leaving a vehicle at each stop, monitoring this data can be used to quantitatively evaluate bus service and to provide information used for planning future services. The system is particularly valuable when paired with other "smart bus" technology such as an AVL system to provide location and time information and Wide Area Network (WAN) capabilities to transfer the data from the bus to the transit provider's central computer system for processing and reporting.