Development of vehicular and personal universal longitudinal travel diary systems using GPS and new technology.

Yen, Kin S.; Donecker, Stephen M.; Yan, Kimball; Swanston, Travis; Adamu, Ayalew; Gallagher, Leo; Assadi, Mohammad; Ravani, Bahram; Lasky, Ty A. · 2006 · ROSA P / California. Dept. of Transportation. Division of Research and Innovation

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Summary

This report details the development of the Global Positioning System Automated Travel Diary (GPS-ATD), a system designed to improve longitudinal travel surveys by reducing respondent burden and increasing data accuracy. Traditional travel surveys, such as paper-and-pencil or telephone interviews, suffer from underreporting, survey fatigue, and an inability to capture day-to-day variability in travel behavior. While previous GPS-aided surveys offered improvements, they faced significant limitations, including short data storage capacities, long GPS startup times, and signal loss in urban environments. The research was motivated by the need for a comprehensive, highly automated data collection method capable of supporting multi-week surveys to better model trip generation, predict transportation policy impacts, and calibrate regional models. The researchers developed two versions of the GPS-ATD: a personal unit for individual travelers and a vehicular unit for cars. The system architecture integrates a High-Sensitivity GPS (HSGPS) receiver as the primary sensor, supplemented by Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) inertial sensors (gyroscopes and accelerometers) in the vehicular unit to provide dead-reckoning during GPS outages or cold starts. The vehicular unit also connects to the vehicle’s On-Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port via ZigBee wireless communication to gather sensor data. Personal and vehicular units coordinate automatically via ZigBee. The hardware was designed with sufficient storage to handle four weeks of data, addressing the limitations of prior devices. The software includes an intuitive user interface requiring minimal input to capture trip activity information, such as purpose and travel mode. The report documents the detailed design, including circuit board assembly, firmware architecture, and component testing. Testing evaluated GPS sensor performance in various environments, including urban canyons, parking structures, and residential streets with tree blockage. The results demonstrated that the HSGPS receiver and MEMS inertial sensors effectively maintained position solutions during GPS signal loss. The system successfully logged data allowing for the identification of corridors, route lengths, and regional trips. User feedback and system testing confirmed that the GPS-ATD minimized respondent burden while maintaining data integrity. The report concludes with recommendations for future work and suggests the system’s potential use in the 2010 California Statewide Household Travel Survey. The significance of this work lies in its contribution to more accurate and efficient travel demand forecasting. By enabling longer-duration surveys with automated data collection, the GPS-ATD addresses the critical issue of day-to-day variability in traveler behavior, which is often missed in short-term surveys. The integration of GPS, inertial sensing, and OBD-II data provides a robust solution for capturing comprehensive travel patterns, including route choice and speed profiles. This technology supports better decision-making at federal, state, and local levels by providing high-quality data for modeling emissions, traffic volumes, and the impacts of transportation policies. The report establishes a foundation for future longitudinal travel studies, offering a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional survey methods.

Key finding

The developed GPS-ATD system successfully integrates high-sensitivity GPS with MEMS inertial sensors and wireless coordination to enable automated, low-burden data collection for longitudinal travel surveys.

Methodology

modeling

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

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• nav systems