Developments in Smartphone-based Travel Surveys and an Application to New Mobility Services in London

Abstract

Building on technological progress, travel survey methods have evolved to take advantage of smartphones for ubiquitous data capture. These devices have high potential to decrease the strain on respondents while also improving the survey experience. The presentation will introduce developments in this area applied in London. First, utilizing the vast amount of open data sources and API’s, the Future Mobility Survey (FMS) smartphone-based travel survey is linked in the back-end to Transport for London’s and Google’s APIs. For example, as London’s public transport fare calculation system is immensely complex, the focus is to streamline the collection of these costs in the survey process, by automating it without user input. Next, a feedback tool is presented, that is incorporated into the survey in the form of a Mobility Record (MR). The MR summarizes the respondents’ costs, travel time, distance and number of trips broken down by each transport mode to further motivate participation in the travel survey. Finally, the collected information is used to aid in the design of a Stated Preference experiment about new mobility services in London.