GPS Surveys and the Internet

Abstract

ITS has been pioneering the use of GPS to provide more accurate data on where and when people travel, their routes, travel distance, and travel time. GPS provides no information on the number of people travelling together, trip purposes, and travel costs. ITS has pioneered the development of a method of collecting this additional information called the prompted recall survey, designed to be conducted some days after the GPS data are collected, using maps and tabular presentations from the GPS records to prompt the respondent’s memory. We describe these surveys and document some of the results. As an improvement on the paper and pencil version, we developed an internet-based survey. This provides animation of each GPS trip, and gives respondents the ability to stop the trip part way through to indicate a trip end that the analysis of the GPS data had not detected, to restart the trip, and to indicate that a stop was only a traffic stop, not a destination. The paper describes the animation, shows the types of data that can be collected, and describes the advantages offered. Some examples are provided of the results of people using the prompted recall survey version.