GPS Travel Diaries in Rural Transportation Research: A Focus on Older Drivers

Gps Travel Diaries Vs. Pen And Paper Diaries

Pen and paper travel diaries were standard approaches for travel data collection prior to the advent of computerized approaches. They were traditionally one day in length, with the occasional two day survey (Stopher & Greaves, 2007). Some believed this timeframe was too short to understand travel behavior and its variability (Axhausen, et al., 2007), but an extended survey length increased respondent burden and the potential for underreported trips and inaccurate recording. These concerns have largely been addressed through the development and use of electronic travel diaries in the early 2000’s facilitated by commercial access to GPS (Murakami et al., 1997; Draijer et al., 2000; Doherty & Miller, 2000; Bachu et al., 2001; Wolf et al., 2001). What continues to pose a challenge for researchers is the adding of contextual information to the travel data such as trip purpose and demographic information, which could permit policy analysis, alternative development and other research possibilities. Methods of adding contextual data have included interacting with a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to enter trip purpose, passenger numbers, etc. (Murakami et al., 1997), associating trip purpose with adjacent land use (Wolf et al., 2001) and prompted recall of participants to fill in the data gaps (Bachu et al., 2001). Recent advances in mobile computing have seen a shift from PDAs to GPS-enabled consumer “smartphone” devices which function as communication and data platforms and can facilitate individual travel data among different modes of transportation. Efforts are underway to see smartphone devices play a larger role in travel data collection for transportation planning purposes (Yu et al., 2012), though some devices have been found to be less accurate than dedicated GPS devices for travel data collection (Bierlaire et al., 2013).