2013 Session: 299

• Using multi-source GPS data to characterize multiday driving patterns and fuel use in a large city region
  Abstract: The paper describes the use of GPS data obtained from both commercial and project-specific sources to examine the travel behavior and fuel consumption patterns of drivers over a three-day period in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Data for commercial (truck and light delivery vehicle) traffic are obtained from a commercial fleet management provider, which continuously tracks the movements of 42,000 vehicles. Data for private car users come from a panel of 720 drivers, whose multiday driving activity is tracked using mobile passive GPS loggers. We analyze and compare the driving behavior of the two driver populations in terms of total distance travelled, spatial patterns (e.g. the amount of travel on different road types) and temporal variations (e.g. variations across time of day and across multiple days). The detailed nature of GPS data also permits the estimation of fuel consumption at a very disaggregate level (by link and time of day), and the identification of differences between user groups, which have significant implications for transport and energy policy. We identify research needs related to the collection and integration of GPS data from multiple sources for model calibration and program evaluation.
  Authors: Venter, Christoffel; Joubert, Johan W.
  Authors: Venter, Christoffel; Joubert, Johan W.
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-1033
• Leveraging the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) for Efficient Transit Analysis
  Abstract: Since 2007, the transit industry has benefited from a widely adopted data standard called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) which has enabled the development of numerous traveler information tools, namely transit trip planners. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the potential for GTFS feeds to be used as a data source for transit analyses such as those found in the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual. Three primary project tasks include an analysis of GTFS field usage by different agencies; an analysis of a single agency at the stop, route and system level; and a batch analysis and comparison of 50 large transit agencies in North America. The experience of developing scripts and database queries for this project compared to alternatives such as “screen-scraping” schedules from transit websites or parsing printed schedules suggests that GTFS is a highly efficient data source and proves the importance of broadly accepted data standards. The methodology documented in this paper and the open-source scripts, which have been made available online, will be useful for any analyst or researcher who has tasks related to analyzing single or multiple transit systems at the stop, route or system level.
  Authors: Wong, James Christopher
  Authors: Wong, James Christopher
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-1070
• Urban Travel Demand Analysis for Austin, Texas, Using Location-Based Social Networking Data
  Abstract: The location-based social networking (LBSN) is a location-sensitive service interactively carried out by users with mobile devices, such as smart phones, to “check-in” with the “venues” reflecting their daily activities. With its increase popularity and sophistication, the location-based social networking (LBSN) data have emerged as a new data source for studying urban travel demand. Comparing with traditional Origin-Destination (O-D) estimation method such as survey based or traffic count based methods, LBSN data has the potential to provide O-D estimation with much higher temporal resolution at much lower cost. In this paper, the Foursquare LBSN data was used to analyze the O-D demand for the urban area near Austin, Texas, USA. A gravity model with two-regime friction factor functions is proposed to estimate the O-D matrix. The proposed methods are calibrated and evaluated against the ground truth O-D data from CAMPO (Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization). The results illustrate the promising potential of using LBSN data for urban travel demand analysis and monitoring.
  Authors: Jin, Jing; Yang, Fan; Cebelak, Meredith; Ran, Bin; Walton, C. Michael
  Authors: Jin, Jing; Yang, Fan; Cebelak, Meredith; Ran, Bin; Walton, C. Michael
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-2374
• Analysis of Route Choice Using Private Probe Data Considering Heterogeneity in Familiarity to Origin-Destination Pairs
  Abstract: An exploratory analysis about the heterogeneity in familiarity to OD pairs is carried out. This analysis is based on the probe data collected by private vehicles in Toyota, Japan. The hypothesis test results show that route choice behavior changes relating to the familiarity to OD pairs. Two specifications of choice models are proposed to consider the effect of familiarity explicitly. The estimation results show that the models consider familiarity fit the data better, and suggest that trips between more familiar OD pairs have larger error variances and less sensitivity to explanation variables. The estimated models are applied to a specific choice situation, the prediction results show the potential biases introduced by not considering heterogeneity in familiarity to OD pairs.
  Authors: Li, Dawei; Miwa, Tomio; Morikawa, Takayuki
  Authors: Li, Dawei; Miwa, Tomio; Morikawa, Takayuki
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-2393
• Methodology of Parking Analysis
  Abstract: Cities are faced with many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the structure of land-use. Parking management, which makes the link between the fields of urban planning and transportation, is one of the crucial ways to meet these challenges. However, parking studies are a poorly covered area in transportation research. The main barrier to study parking is parking data availability.In the Greater Montreal Area, data from origin-destination (OD) surveys are helpful in understanding typical travel behavior. These surveys have been conducted for forty years and provide useful data to describe and model various spatial-temporal features of daily mobility.This research illustrates the use of OD survey data to develop indicators on parking spaces and use in a given area. This study confirms that the systematic processing of car driver trips from travel surveys allows developing vehicle accumulation profiles for various zones and, from these, derive theoretical parking capacities. This research provides an assessment of the quality of the estimation by comparing the estimations from OD survey to other sources of data, namely geographical data and field surveys.The paper shows that parking capacity is subject to high variability and highlights that its assessment is quite complex and must take into account regulation data that modulates the availability of the raw parking capacity according to different days and hours of the day.
  Authors: Diallo, Abdoulaye; Morency, Catherine; Saunier, Nicolas
  Authors: Diallo, Abdoulaye; Morency, Catherine; Saunier, Nicolas
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-2520
• Understanding Urban Human Activity and Mobility Patterns Using Large-Scale Location-Based Data from Online Social Media
  Abstract: Location-based check-in services enable individuals to share their activity-related choicesproviding a new source of human activity data for researchers. In this paper urban humanmobility and activity patterns are analyzed using location-based data collected from socialmedia applications (e.g. Foursquare and Twitter). We first characterize aggregate activitypatterns by finding the distributions of different activity categories over a city geographyand thus determine the purpose-specific activity centers. We then characterize individualactivity patterns by finding the timing distribution of visiting different places depending onactivity category. We also explore the frequency of visiting a place with respect to the rankof the place in individual's visitation records and show interesting match with other resultsbased on mobile phone mobility data. We finally propose a physics-based model of humanmobility patterns that can explain the scaling laws observed in the data.
  Authors: Hasan, Samiul; Ukkusuri, Satish V.; Zhan, Xianyuan
  Authors: Hasan, Samiul; Ukkusuri, Satish V.; Zhan, Xianyuan
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-3172
• Obtaining Public Transport Level-of-Service Measures with In-vehicle GPS Data and Freely Available GIS Web-Based Tools
  Abstract: Information technology has set new standards within public transport system management strategies, and renewed attention has been paid to vehicle level-of-service (LOS) performance measurement techniques in recent years. Specifically, in-vehicle GPS technology provides a good opportunity to collect substantial amounts of useful data for accurate public transport LOS measuring. Handling these rich data can be labour intensive, time consuming and challenging, especially in highly dense networks. Systematic, easy to apply, and inexpensive techniques to process information quickly and display LOS outcomes efficiently are required.The main aim of this paper is to present a procedure to obtain LOS measures at any spatial and temporal aggregation level in the case of dense bus networks using freely available map and geographic software. The proposed methodology is highly flexible as it can accommodate either fixed or variable space-time aggregations; it can handle vast amounts of GPS data yielding LOS results relatively quickly. Furthermore, it can be implemented at relatively low cost in terms of software requirements, using freely available software.An illustration of the proposed procedure and its results to obtain LOS measures among bus stops is reported, using the geographic location of bus stops and offline GPS data available (every 30 seconds) for all operating buses in Santiago´s public transport system.
  Authors: Arellana, Julian; Ortuzar, Juan de Dios; Rizzi, Luis I.; Zuñiga, Felipe
  Authors: Arellana, Julian; Ortuzar, Juan de Dios; Rizzi, Luis I.; Zuñiga, Felipe
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Paper
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-3896
• Using multi-source GPS data to characterize multiday driving patterns and fuel use in a large city region
  Authors: Venter, Christoffel
  Authors: Venter, Christoffel
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Presentation; Poster
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-1033
• Leveraging the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) for Efficient Transit Analysis
  Authors: Wong, James
  Authors: Wong, James
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Presentation; Poster
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-1070
• Urban Travel Demand Analysis for Austin, Texas, Using Location-Based Social Networking Data
  Authors: Jin, Jing
  Authors: Jin, Jing
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Presentation; Poster
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-2374
• Obtaining Public Transport Level-of-Service Measures with In-vehicle GPS Data and Freely Available GIS Web-Based Tools
  Authors: Arellana, Julian
  Authors: Arellana, Julian
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Presentation; Poster
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-3896
• Using multi-source GPS data to characterize multiday driving patterns and fuel use in a large city region
  Authors: Joubert, Johan
  Authors: Joubert, Johan
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Presentation; Poster
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-1033
• Analysis of Route Choice Using Private Probe Data Considering Heterogeneity in Familiarity to Origin-Destination Pairs
  Authors: Li, Dawei
  Authors: Li, Dawei
  Year: 2013
  Document Type: Presentation; Poster
  Subject: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting
  Session: 299
  Paper Number: 13-2393