01516079

Component

The ability to passively track large numbers of mobile devices has generated a lot of excitement in recent years. Traditional travel surveys without Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracking, either wholly or in part, seems passé today. However, GPS tracking can only overcome some of the problems associated with travel diary surveys. It can capture missed trips and route choice information, but at increased cost per survey. However, it does nothing to ease the rising cost and difficulty associated with contacting, recruiting, retaining households in the first place, or collecting and processing the data. Passive tracking overcomes these limitations, at the expense of giving up interaction with the device owner. Thus, information about the traveler, trip purpose, and other details must be inferred or lost. The ideal solution is to use both travel diaries and passive tracking together. While techniques for fusing these data are yet to be proven the concept has strong intuitive appeal. Until such techniques emerge the question becomes whether such data can be used on their own, and whether they resemble the output of travel models built using traditional survey data. The opportunity to answer such questions arose recently in the Research Triangle Region of North Carolina, which served as a pilot project for using origin destination data from AirSage as an adjunct to modeling. A detailed analysis of the differences between the AirSage data and the Triangle Regional Model (TRM) has been completed. The differences were subtle in some cases and surprising in others. This paper reports on the findings of this comparison. A brief description of the AirSage data and TRM provides the context for the discussion. Presented in this paper is the methodology for comparing the two data sources along with the results. The results show that the highway assignment using AirSage data is comparable to the highway assignment using model estimated trip tables, supporting the use of passively collected cellular data as a low cost option for travel model validation.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB50 Transportation Planning Applications.

01503729

14-1058

English

12p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Cellular telephones; Global Positioning System; Origin and destination; Route choice; Tracking systems; Travel diaries; Travel surveys; Trip purpose

North Carolina

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

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-1058

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:25PM