Elimination of the Travel Diary: An Experiment to Derive Trip Purpose from GPS Travel Data

Jean Wolf, Randall Guensler, and William Bachman. Elimination of the travel diary: An experiment to derive trip purpose from GPS travel data. Notes from Transportation Research Board, 80th annual meeting, January 7– 11, 2001, Washington, D.C.

This paper presents the results of a proof-of-concept study to obtain trip purposes out of GPS data and replace traditional travel diaries. In their findings, the authors mention that the equipment packages deployed for the pilot study proved to have many more problems than anticipated. The off-the-shelf units and cabling used were not optimized for durability (mobile device power problems or application errors. Some participants were dropped because numerous data errors indicated problems with equipment performance, cabling connections, and user operations. Therefore, an improved equipment packages would be necessary for commercial deployment.

Another significant issue cause the incorrect trip purpose assignment for 7% of the trips. All of these trips were misidentified as a result of inaccurate land use assignment. These land use assignment errors resulted from GPS position errors (e.g. uncorrected GPS data or premature termination of data stream), inaccurate parcel boundaries in GIS database, inaccurate assignment of parcel to the GPS trip end, or inaccurate coding of the land use in the parcel database.

Relation to my thesis: Example from the field of transportation research of the use of sometime poor location information quality. The quality depends on the sensed-data (e.g. premature end of data-stream due to urban canyon), the GIS database and the data processing (e.g. coding of trips).