Monitoring travel behavior for hard to catch person groups

Abstract

The analysis of travel behavior is based on generating trip diaries for test persons. Classic interview techniques suffer from missing trips and route choice, inaccurate travel times and trip lengths. Asking every mode change along multimodal trips increases the complexity of surveys even more. Tourists are seldom interviewed in terms of travel behavior at the visited site, because they are hard to catch for classic surveys. Smartphones offer the possibility to record time and location of its actual position, which can be used to generate trip diaries. This paper presents a technique to take use of the different smartphone sensors providing location information and aggregate the collected data to trips or stays. The system generates automatically trip diaries and estimates the used mode. Frequent visited locations are identified to collect data of popular sites and traffic hubs. The privacy of the test person can be maintained by stop tracking at special locations like home, shopping or work. The paper presents results from a small group of test persons and shows, that the proposed technique is able to identify route choice and mode. However the limiting factors of smartphones are shown, which suggest careful implementation of the application and a server side processing of the data at the present time. Web based data transmission and verification makes this technique applicable even for persons which are only temporarily in the monitored region.