Using Smartphones to Collect Bicycle Travel Data in Texas

Researchers believed that if smartphones could prove to be an effective tool for collecting bicycle travel data, the information could be used for aiding decision making as to what types of facilities users prefer and guiding decisions about future facilities. If adequate facilities were provided, the mode share of bicyclists would increase and lead to a reduction in congestion. Thus, researchers used an existing smartphone application, CycleTracks, developed by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, to develop this study. Austin-area bicyclists were targeted to test the application. Austin’s strong cycling culture, its known bicycle friendliness, and the presence of several universities including the University of Texas made it an ideal test environment. Bicycle route data was collected between May 1 and October 31, 2011 during which time over 3,600 routes were recorded. About 300 bicyclists provided their age, gender, bicycling frequency, home zip code, work zip code, and school zip code. Eighty-three percent of these participants indicated that they bicycle daily or several times per week. Most participants live and work in the central area of Austin. Seventy percent of the participants were male and 30 percent female. There were slightly more participants in the 20-29 age range than the 30-39 and 40-49 age ranges. Many defined the purpose of the bicycle trip: 85 percent of the trips were for the purpose of transportation vs. recreation. Using algorithms within ArcGIS, researchers were able to match almost 90 percent of the bicycle routes. The collected dataset provided a rich set of bicyclist and route attributes useful for identifying route choice decisions. Despite the manageable challenges of the data cleaning, network completion, and map-matching process, the amount of information provided by the use of CycleTracks far exceeds what would be available using other data collection methods.