Decomposition of travel time expenditure through individual mobility trajectories based on mobile phone signaling data

The concept of travel time expenditure (TTE) or travel time budget (TTB) was developed approximately 60 years ago, and its stability issues have long been debated based on traditional household travel survey (HHTS) methods or less developed information and communication technologies (ICTs). Recent advances in mobile phone technologies have enabled the use of individuals' mobility information at the disaggregation level. The objective of this study is to explore the TTE based on mobile phone signaling data (MPSD) collected from the residents in two different types of districts in South Korea. The results may produce better spatiotemporal precision than traditional household survey data because MPSD is generated when a mobile phone changes the cell coverage area and base transceiver stations (BTSs) or whenever the recording time interval set by the cellular service provider arrives. On the other hand, tremendous effort is needed to collect and clean up the raw data compared to data obtained using the conventional HHTS method. This paper presents data-cleaning processes and the results of a TTE calculation as a function of the day of weekday, age group, and region type. The processes and results of this study could be useful for modeling human mobility behavior using MPSD.

Automated summary

This study explores the concept of travel time expenditure using mobile phone signaling data and achieves better spatiotemporal precision than traditional household survey data. However, collecting and cleaning the raw data requires tremendous effort.