Chapter 22: Mobile Technologies: Synthesis of a Workshop

Over the past decade, increasing attention has been given to the application of mobile technologies for the collection and processing of travel survey data at the ISCTSC conference. In fact, two workshops at the 2008 conference were dedicated to this topic (the other one focused on non-response challenges in GPS-based surveys), and many of the other workshop reports mentioned mobile technologies as a possible solution for data-collection challenges facing their survey areas, such as studies of freight movement, tourism, and hard-to-reach groups. This increasing attention reflects the growing opportunities for the application of mobile technologies in travel surveys to address issues with respondent burden, sample biases, breadth of details collected, and the accuracy of key travel data elements (such as origin and destination locations, trip times, travel durations and distances, and routes taken) that are ongoing challenges with more traditional survey methods.