01476165

Component

Positioning technologies in commercially-available mobile phones have matured significantly over the last five years, offering new opportunities to collect high resolution spatial travel behavior data for transportation research and operations. This paper discusses the use of a global positioning system (GPS) mobile phone application, TRAC-IT, to collect travel behavior data of carsharing users as part of a variable pricing experiment. A random sample of 30 participants carried a mobile phone with TRAC-IT installed, resulting in over 4 million GPS data points that provided precise geographic and spatio-temporal information. These data informed an analysis of the participants’ geographic footprint by estimating a set of standard-distance ellipses of carsharing and non-carsharing modes. Spatial analysis results show that carsharing users have a much smaller activity space (0.5 square miles) than individuals not using carsharing over the same period (7.8 square miles). The activity space of carsharing users contracts while using carsharing as a mode of transport (0.2 square miles for carsharing versus 0.5 square miles for other modes). This may be because carsharing users do not have access to a private vehicle and, therefore, rely on carsharing to conduct out-of-home required trips for maintenance activities, such as grocery shopping.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ40 Travel Survey Methods.

01470560

13-1107

English

16p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Global Positioning System; Mobile telephones; Travel behavior; Travel surveys; Vehicle sharing

Data and Information Technology; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-1107

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:19PM