Smartphone based travel diary collection : Experiences from a field trial in Stockholm

• Currently, there is a great need for new methods to collect travel data. Traditional methods have considerable drawbacks and, at the same time, the models used to analyse the transport system require more and more detailed and high-quality data. Since most smartphones are equipped with various sensors that can be used to determine the location of the smartphone, and since smartphones are integrated in the daily life of most people, they provide an unprecedented opportunity for large-scale travel data collection. This method has a great potential to solve the problems related to the estimation of distance/travel time, geographic coding of departure/destination locations and forgotten trips and it will also provide a more detailed and extensive data set.In a recently completed research project the feasibility of replacing or complementing the traditional travel diary, with a suite of tools that make use of smartphone collected travel data has been evaluated. The advantages and disadvantages of the traditional method and the proposed method were studied. For a fair comparison, both methods have been tested in the same city, at the same time, and with the same respondents. To achieve the objectives of the project, MEILI, a system that consists of a smartphone application for capturing the movement of users and a web application for allowing the users to annotate their movement, has been deployed. In total 2142 trips were collected and annotated by 171 users. 51 of the users annotated trips covering more than a week. The main findings of the paper are that smartphone based data collection is feasible, that the algorithms to save battery work well and that trips of the same respondent vary considerably depending on day of the week.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik -- Transportteknik och logistik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering -- Transport Systems and Logistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Travel survey

Data acquisition

Mobile phone

Journey

Method

Evaluation (assessment)

11 Road: Personal transport

11 Road: Personal transport

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)