An Analysis of Factors Influencing Differences in Survey-Reported and GPS-Recorded Trips

Recent advances in global positioning systems (GPS) technology have resulted in a transition in household travel survey methods to test the use of GPS units to record travel details, followed by the application of an algorithm to both identify trips and impute trip purpose, typically supplemented with some level of respondent confirmation via prompted-recall surveys. As the research community evaluates this new approach to potentially replace the traditional survey-reported collection method, it is important to consider how well the GPS-recorded and algorithm-imputed details capture trip details and whether the traditional survey-reported collection method may be preferred with regards to some types of travel. The empirical results in this paper, based on the 2009 Indianapolis regional household travel survey, provide important insights regarding differences in measures of travel intensities related to the two different data collection modes (survey travel diary and GPS).