Evaluation of Existing Smartphone Applications and Data Needs for Travel Survey.

摘要

Current and reliable data on traffic movements play a key role in transportation planning, modeling, and air quality analysis. Traditional travel surveys conducted via paper-and-pencil or computer-aided are costly, time consuming, and labor intensive for survey conductors; and place significant burden to the survey participants. Furthermore the accuracy and completeness are susceptible to participants’ after-fact memory. On the other hand, smartphones are an integral part of daily life for many people in the world today. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s survey, in May 2011, 83% of U.S. adults have a cell phone and 42% of them own a smartphone. Many people today interact with their cell phones constantly to some degree through checking messages or emails, playing games, and talking. Smartphone applications have a great potential to lower the costs, reduce the burden, and increase the accuracy and completeness of travel surveys. This project evaluated existing smartphone applications for conducting travel surveys. The project compiled a list of the pioneering smartphone travel survey efforts and lessons learned, compared them, and analyzed their applicability to serve TxDOT survey needs. The project identified and installed a list of smartphone travel survey applications to thoroughly evaluate and compare their capabilities. The project summarized and classified the data elements collected by TxDOT surveys and built a prototype smartphone household survey app to validate that all the survey data can be collected using smartphones. The project discussed the opportunities and challenges in fully realizing the potential of using smartphone applications for travel surveys.