Comparison of Cell, GPS, and Bluetooth Derived Travel Data Results from the 2014 Tyler, Texas Study Texas A&M Big Data Workshop February 13, 2015 Ed Hard Byron Chigoy Praprut Songchitruksa, Ph.D, P.E. Steve Farnsworth Darrell Borchardt, P.E.

Comparison of O-D Data by Technology Origin-Destination (O-D) 2 Technology Comparison Cellular GPS Data Stream Bluetooth Data Unitcell ‘sighting’GPS pingMAC address Type of Travel Collectedmovements /flowstrips traces trips between device readers Data Saturation/Penetrationgoodpoorfair Positional Accuracy150–500 meters5–30 meters100 meters Sample Frequencyminutes, hours seconds, minutes seconds Continuous Data Stream?noyes Is it Big Data?yessometimesno

Study Area and Overview 3 Tyler MPO, Smith County, Texas Conducted Spring 2014 Focused on: – external trips, E-E, E-I/I-E – average weekday trips Trial external O-D travel survey using cell, GPS, Bluetooth (BT) Tyler

Data Collection/Capture Time Periods 4 Bluetooth - 2 weeks, April 1-April 14 Cell - 4 weeks, March 21-April 24 GPS - 3 months, February 24 – May 9

Study Area Zones and Capture Areas MPO zones aggregated to 307 cell capture zones 18 Exterior cell data capture areas created 10 mile GPS buffer area utilized

Bluetooth Detection and E-E Matching 6 Over 170,000 BT observations during study period – 24,500 ave. weekday E-E matches – 4,000 per ave. weekday matches with time constraints BT detection ranged from 4% to 11% Matches expanded to counts

Cell Data Processing, Analyses 7 198,000 unique resident devices; 17% residential sampling rate Ave. of 180 device sightings per day Removed trips that did not cross study boundary For E-E: developed trip matrix, counts by station, percent resident vs non-residents by station For E-I/I-E: developed matrix, trip length frequency distributions (TLFD)

GPS Data Processing, Analyses 8 Raw GPS data processed to develop O-D trips Analysis incorporated anonymization O-D datasets developed for freight, cars, and apps Developed E-E, E-I/I-E trips and count totals by station Same E-E time constraints for GPS as used for Bluetooth

External-to-External Results All Vehicles 9

E-E Results 10

E-I/I-E Results – Total Trips Saturation/Distribution across Internal TAZs Max Value = 13,500 Max Value = 4,900 Max Value = 3,500 GPS Data 2004 Survey Data Cell Data 11

E-I/I-E Trip Length All Stations – All Vehicles 12 K-S Test p-value << 0.01

Conclusions Highly Summarized 13 O-D methods/technologies still evolving Combination of technologies providers best approach for external data (currently) Bluetooth remains E-E benchmark, for time being Cell data better suited for larger studies areas Third party GPS appears to be viable option – especially as sample sizes increase – more trials needed

For more Information: Ed Hard (979) Byron Chigoy (512) Praprut Songchitruksa, Ph.D., P.E. (979) Steve Farnsworth (979) Questions? 14

Acknowledgments and Special Thanks! 15 Bill Knowles Janie Temple Charlie Hall Bill King Vijay Sivaraman Rick Schuman Andrew Davies