Analyzing door-to-door travel times through mobile phone data

Abstract

A strategic objective of the European transport policy is the so-called 4-h door-to-door target, according to which, by 2050, 90% of travelers within Europe should be able to complete their journey, door-to-door, within 4 h. However, information on door-to-door travel times is scarce and difficult to obtain, which make it difficult to assess the level of accomplishment of this ambitious target. In this paper, we extract door-to-door travel times based on the analysis of opportunistically collected data generated by mobile phones. Anonymized mobile phone records are combined with data from the Google Maps Directions API to reconstruct the different legs of the trip and estimate the travel times for the door-to-kerb, kerb-to-gate, gate-to-gate, gate-to-kerb and kerb-to-door segments. The travel times of these legs have been extracted for different scenarios, all of them focusing on the Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas airport, with the aim of exploring their influence on total door-to-door travel time. Results show that the methodology presented is able to measure door-to-door travel times and that these travel times measured are far from the 4-h door-to-door target. We finish by outlining future research directions.