Use of a Smartphone GPS Application for Recurrent Travel Behavior Data Collection

Abstract

Smartphone-based household travel survey (HTS) studies to date have typically followed the two-part survey process that has historically been used for paper, computer-assisted telephone interviewing, and online HTS. In this two-part survey process, households provide demographic data in a recruit survey (part one) and record trips in a travel diary (part two) often at a later date. The Metropolitan Council, the planning organization serving the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Minnesota, has conducted a pilot study for their cyclical HTS, the Travel Behavior Inventory (TBI), that is one of the first large-scale fields of an all-in-one smartphone HTS design. For the 2018 TBI pilot, the traditional two-part survey was merged into a continuous survey experience within a smartphone app. The TBI pilot used a split sample to test this all-in-one design against a traditional two-part smartphone survey design. For the all-in-one design, households were invited to sign in directly to the smartphone application instead of first recruiting online or by phone. The pilot results provide a direct comparison of the two-part and all-in-one designs at the household-, person-, and trip-levels. The results showed a lower overall recruit and completion rate for the all-in-one design but showed clear promise for increasing representation of younger and lower-income populations—traditionally hard-to-reach groups who completed at a higher rate with all-in-one. The authors discuss several factors which may have contributed to the lower overall completion rate and describe planned updates for future waves of the TBI aimed at improving overall response while maintaining the developments that have improved representation from hard-to-reach groups.

Mobile Technology and Studies on Transport Behavior: A Literature Analysis, Integrated Research Model, and Future Research Agenda

“…e travel mode for trip legs and purpose could be recorded with proper interface design and streamlined process quality assessment. Lynch et al [109], via a smartphone-based household travel survey, showed methods for increasing the representation of hear-to-reach riders. Vich et al analyzed the factors that influenced the extent of activity spaces of suburban commuters at the individual and environmental levels using data from smartphone apps, in which the effectiveness of the calculation method for measuring activity spaces was explored [17].…”

Non-Participation in Smartphone Data Collection Using Research Apps

“…no. of calls and text messages, Internet browsing, app usage) has been used to study, among others, mobility patterns (Elevelt et al, 2019; Lynch et al, 2019; Scherpenzeel, 2017), the influence of physical surroundings and activity on psychological well‐being and health (Goodspeed et al, 2018; Lathia et al, 2017; MacKerron & Mourato, 2013; York Cornwell & Cagney, 2017), student well‐being over the course of an academic term (Ben‐Zeev et al, 2015; Harari et al, 2017; Wang et al, 2014), integration efforts of refugees (Keusch, Leonard, et al, 2019), and job search of men recently released from prison (Sugie, 2018; Sugie & Lens, 2017).…”

An App-Assisted Travel Survey in Official Statistics: Possibilities and Challenges

“…Additionally, Roddis et al (2019) found that respondents rated interaction with an app more enjoyable than either a traditional user-completed travel diary or a personal log, rating it as less burdensome, and both Roddis et al (2019) and Safi et al (2017) demonstrated that smartphone-based apps provided higher-quality data in comparison with recall-based TDS. These potential advantages have led to the introduction of multiple app-based travel diaries (Berger and Platzer 2015;Cottrill et al 2013;Greaves et al 2015;Lynch et al 2019;Patterson and Fitzsimmons 2016;Prelipcean et al 2018). To date, however, these studies have yet to address the unique challenges involved with fieldwork within the general population, nor has the impact of a large-scale implementation been assessed.…”