A framework for smartphone-based travel surveys: An empirical comparison with alternative methods in New Zealand

The increasing demand for advanced modelling methods, which can reflect complex travel activities of individuals, requires enhanced travel data collection methods. The introduction of GPS-assisted data collection methods has provided an alternative to conventional methods. It improves the accuracy of data collection and captures more details of individuals’ travel behaviour. However, the deployment of these methods usually requires considerable financial as well as human resources, and may impose some burden on participants. Recent technological advancements in smartphone-based positioning technologies and communication facilities have opened up new opportunities to apply smartphones as the media of data collection. However the performance of recently introduced travel data collection methods has not been evaluated in practice. This paper evaluates the performance of four alternative travel survey methods in a real-world scaled travel data collection: a web-based, a handheld GPS tracking, a smartphone GPS tracking and a smartphone-based prompted-recall data collection methods. These methods are compared in terms of their ease of interaction with participants, the demographic attributes of participants, the quality of collected data, and the share and frequency of reported trips in terms of the mode of travel. The results show that the smartphone-based prompted-recall data collection method has better performance in interacting with participants and providing higher quality data. In general, smartphone-assisted data collection methods can more accurately reflect non-motorised trips.