Driving Activity Locations Inferred from Smartphone Data
Corresponding Author: Eazaz Sadeghvaziri, Florida International University
Presented By: Eazaz Sadeghvaziri , Florida International University
Abstract
In order to support efficient transportation planning decisions, household travel survey data with high levels of accuracy are essential. Due to a number of issues associated with conventional household travel surveys, including high cost, low response rate, trip misreporting, and respondents’ self-reporting bias, government and private agencies are desperately searching for alternative data collection methods. Recent advancements in smart phones and Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies present new opportunities to track travelers’ trips. Considering the high penetration rate of smartphones, it seems reasonable to use smartphone data as a reliable source of individual travel diary. The Google Location History (GLH) data provide an opportunity to explore the potential of these data. One month of GLH data are obtained from 50 participants. This presentation describes the data processing methods in deriving travel information, including trip ends, modes, activity types, etc. Geographic Information System (GIS) tools are also employed to facilitate the data processing. The results show great promise of using GLH data as a supplement or complement to conventional travel diary data. It shows that GLH provides sufficient high resolution data that can be used to study people’s movement without respondent burden, and potentially it can be applied to a large scale study easily. These data provide the opportunity to facilitate the investigation of various issues, such as less frequent long-distance travel, daily variations in travel behavior, and human mobility pattern in large spatio-temporal scale.