Extending the Scope of Travel Surveys using Differential GPS

Mami Ueno, Nathalie Noël, Sean Doherty, Martin Lee-Gosselin, François Theberge, and Claude Sirois

Abstract:	Personal travel and its evolution are of concern to urban planners. This paper reports on a four-month trial undertaken in Quebec City to test the feasibility of recording personal travel over a multi-week period using GPS (Global Positioning System), and analyzing the results using a regional GIS with a substantial number of data overlays. It was decided: (a) to limit this trial to vehicle travel to minimize problems of power supply and to allow relatively heavy equipment to be used if required; (b) to simplify route-matching in the GIS by using the Canadian Coast Guard's differential correction signal in real-time; and (c) to use two types of off-the-shelf DGPS (Differential GPS) receiver. One of the DGPS systems consisted of a GPS receiver, differential module, and a portable computer, all connected to a car's cigarette lighter, while the other had data storage built into the DGPS receiver and was powered by two VCR batteries. Data were transferred as ASCII files. Routines were developed for route matching with and without differential correction, and for the recognition of stops at activity locations. This paper summarizes the results of the test analyses, which were undertaken in MapInfo„1# These included data quality and outages, travel time and distance by class of road, speed, acceleration-deceleration, and the timing, frequency and geographical range of activities. The accuracy of differential positioning was comparable to the map database used in this research (5-10m), and fewer than 10% of points required adjustment by the algorithm. We compare of the methods of data collection using the different types of receiver, together with a variety of pilot data interfaces. Finally, the discussion is given to new directions for spatio-temporal analyses of urban travel which are enabled by this type of GPS data.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 12th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1999) September 14 - 17, 1999 Nashville, TN
Pages:	1709 - 1716
Cite this article:	Ueno, Mami, Noël, Nathalie, Doherty, Sean, Lee-Gosselin, Martin, Theberge, François, Sirois, Claude, "Extending the Scope of Travel Surveys using Differential GPS," Proceedings of the 12th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1999), Nashville, TN, September 1999, pp. 1709-1716.
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