Are we there yet? Assessing smartphone apps as full-fledged tools for activity-travel surveys

Harding, Chris; Faghih-Imani, Ahmadreza; Srikukenthiran, Siva; Miller, Eric J.; Habib, Khandker Nurul

doi:10.1007/s11116-020-10135-7

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Even if it may be unrealistic to expect regional models to become sensitive to unanticipated population-wide shocks to travel behaviors, shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings about changes in built-environment relationships with walking suggest that travel forecasting systems should continue to become more flexible and responsive. Actions such as utilizing more up-to-date big data sources such as traffic signal data (used in this research) or passive smartphone data ( 57 ), and further developing the capabilities of citywide digital twins ( 58 ), could help transportation planning to become more robust to future disturbances.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedestrians and the Built Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Changing Relationships by the Pandemic Phases in Salt Lake County, Utah, U.S.A.

Park

Singleton

Brewer

et al. 2022

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation R

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The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered people’s travel behavior, in particular outdoor activities, including walking. Their behavior changes may have prolonged effects after the pandemic, and such changes vary by the context and are related to the characteristics of the built environment. But empirical studies about the relationships between pedestrians and the built environment during the pandemic are lacking. This study explores how COVID-19 and related travel restrictions have affected the relationship between pedestrian traffic volume and the built environment. We estimate daily pedestrian volumes for all signalized intersections in Salt Lake County, Utah, U.S.A., from pedestrian push-button log data between January 2019 and October 2020. Multilevel spatial filtering models show that the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the relationship between pedestrian traffic volume and the built environment. During the pandemic, the higher the number of COVID-19 cases, the less (or more negative) the effects of density, street connectivity, and destination accessibility on pedestrian volume being observed. The exception is access to urban parks, as it became more significant in increasing pedestrian activities during the pandemic. The models also highlight the negative impacts of the pandemic in economically disadvantaged areas. Our findings could help urban and transportation planners find effective interventions to promote active transportation and physical activity amid the global pandemic.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedestrians and the Built Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Changing Relationships by the Pandemic Phases in Salt Lake County, Utah, U.S.A.

Park

Singleton

Brewer

et al. 2022

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation R

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“…However, smartphone-derived data have several issues which increase the difficulty of using them in TDM applications (Zanbergen 2009; Preplipcean and Yamamoto 2018). A number of barriers, for example, urban canyons, user behaviour and variation in service and phone quality (Jariyasunant et al, 2014; Harding et al, 2021), make it difficult for smartphone GPS to consistently detect user location with accuracy (Harding et al, 2021), which necessitates supplementary data processing to remove errors (Chen et al, 2018). GPS tracking, especially from specialized apps created by researchers, also leads to drain of battery life, which is a strong concern for users and limits tracking time (Jariyasunant et al, 2014).…”

Section: Modelling Travel Demandmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While these data provide automated collection with greater speed, scope and variety of information about transportation patterns, significant issues remain in the application of these data sources (Milne and Watling, 2019). Big data from smartphones have a number of known issues which create challenges for researchers (Zandbergen 2009; Prelipcean and Yamamoto 2018), including detection accuracy (Chen et al, 2018; Harding et al, 2021), variation in service and phone quality (Jariyasunant et al, 2014; Harding et al, 2021), and battery drain (Jariyasunant et al, 2014). Smart cards and open source applications like CycleTracks often feature samples which over-represent younger, economically active and tech-savvy populations (Bagchi and White 2005; Milne and Watling 2019), as well as intensive app users (Chen et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A method to derive small area estimates of linked commuting trips by mode from open source LODES and ACS data

Credit

Arnao

2022

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

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This paper describes a fully customizable open source method to create linked origin-destination data on commuting flows by mode at the Census tract scale by combining LODES and ACS data from the US Census Bureau. With additional work, the method could be scaled to the entire US (with a small number of exceptions) for every year from 2002 to 2019. For demonstration purposes, the paper applies this method to 2015 commuting flows in Cook County, Illinois. At an aggregate scale, the results of this application show that commuting by all modes is dominated by travel to large regional employment centres. However, the pattern is more localised for the walking mode, and focused along corridors of mode-specific infrastructure investment for the cycling and transit modes, as might be expected. The auto and work from home modes demonstrate the most distributed pattern of travel, revealing more instances of commuting to regional sub-centres than the other modes.

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“…Besides web-based approach described above, recent advancement in travel surveys also used Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled portable devices to collect travel diaries(Shen & Stopher, 2014;Verzosa et al, 2017;Harding et al, 2020). The portable devices, usually smartphones, use various technologies, such as GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, allowing accurate collection of location and travel data over space and time.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who drops off web-based travel surveys? Investigating the implications of respondents dropping out of travel diaries during online travel surveys

Wang

Liu

Hossain

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Household travel surveys collect core datasets for modelling passenger travel demand. However, decline in survey completion rate is becoming a concern in recent years. One major cause is the transition from computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) to computer-assisted web interviews (CAWI) surveys, where respondents need to self-complete the surveys without any active help from an interviewer. Among all components, the travel diaries are the most challenging part of CAWI travel surveys and suffer significant dropouts of participation. Therefore, an investigation is necessary to understand the implications of such participation dropouts in CAWI-based household travel surveys on travel survey data quality. This study reports two travel diary designs developed to ease response burdens in travel surveys. Empirical investigations are conducted to understand survey participation drop-off behaviour while filling out travel diaries. In proxy household travel surveys, diary designs with stable repetitions outperform sophisticated diary designs. In a survey deployed with supposedly advanced diary designs, respondents with higher travel demand are more likely to drop out. Estimated using a generalizable analysis framework proposed by this study, the travel demand reflected in the final dataset collected using the sophisticated travel diary design might be underestimated by 10.2%. This study also proposes strategies and recommendations for future travel surveys.

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Are we there yet? Assessing smartphone apps as full-fledged tools for activity-travel surveys

Cited by 19 publications

References 24 publications

Pedestrians and the Built Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Changing Relationships by the Pandemic Phases in Salt Lake County, Utah, U.S.A.

Pedestrians and the Built Environment during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Changing Relationships by the Pandemic Phases in Salt Lake County, Utah, U.S.A.

A method to derive small area estimates of linked commuting trips by mode from open source LODES and ACS data

Who drops off web-based travel surveys? Investigating the implications of respondents dropping out of travel diaries during online travel surveys

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