Evaluating the Feasibility of Data Collection via GPS-Enabled Mobile Phones for Passive Household Travel Surveys

GPS-enabled mobile phones are becoming more popular and have the potential to be substituted for standalone GPS devices in household travel surveys. In this paper, a set of experiments was designed to evaluate the feasibility of data collection via GPS-enabled mobile phones for travel survey purposes. One of the experiments compared smartphones and specialized GPS devices to explore the accuracy of the position data obtained by mobile phones. Another experiment studied how keeping the mobile phone GPS online all day might affect the battery life and attempted to seek a proper energy saving strategy for a mobile phone-based household survey application system. The experimental results indicate that the position data obtained by the cellphone-based GPS are comparable to those acquired with a stand-alone GPS device, thus having sufficient accuracy for passive household travel surveys. In addition, the cellphone battery provided sufficient power supply to support the household travel survey for an entire workday when a power-efficiency strategy for GPS usage was implemented. It is therefore feasible to use GPS-enabled mobile phones instead of standalone GPS devices for household travel surveys.