An App-Assisted Travel Survey in Official Statistics: Possibilities and Challenges

Advances in smartphone technology have allowed for individuals to have access to near-continuous location tracking at a very precise level. As the backbone of mobility research, the Travel Diary Study, has continued to offer decreasing response rates over the years, researchers are looking to these mobile devices to bridge the gap between self-report recall studies and a person’s underlying travel behavior. This article details an open-source application that collects real-time location data which respondents may then annotate to provide a detailed travel diary. Results of the field test involving 674 participants are discussed, including technical performance, data quality and response rate.