Where do you want to go today?: More observations on daily mobility

Abstract

The exploration of the Mobidrive six-week travel diary data over the last few years has deepened the understanding of the dynamics, the regularity and the variability in daily travel. The success of the Mobidrive project with the implementation of a longitudinal travel survey and the subsequent data analysis, motivated to search for mobility data which covers even longer periods of observation – eventually even capturing the seasonal variations of individual travel demand. At present, such an innovative long-term travel behaviour data source based on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) information is jointly processed and analysed at the IVT (ETHZ) and ROSO / DMA (EPFL). The Borlange (Sweden) GPS data covers a monitoring period for privately used cars of up to two years. Travel behaviour and time use research has never had the opportunity to track individuals for longer than some weeks in order to find out about the systematic and the spontaneous part of behaviour. This paper gives an overview of the current status of the GPS data post-processing work and reports on the suitability of GPS travel data for the analysis of individual activity spaces.