Crowd-sourced web survey for household travel diaries

Abstract

This study presents an open-source, web-based, self-completion and/or personal-interview survey platform, namely Travel Survey as a Service (TSaaS), which currently hosts three different survey types. This study proposes to use the TSaaS platform as the crowd-sourced data collection approach for household travel diaries. The TSaaS provides flexibility to conduct multiple surveys for different purposes/locations simultaneously using a web survey format. For better control of the data collection process, multiple survey links for household travel diaries (or any other survey) in a region can be created. Eventually, collected data can be processed jointly or separately as per the requirements. The data is recorded in an efficient data structure. Personal information and location are neither asked nor tracked using devices or otherwise. To assist in recalling the activity locations, a location-search field is provided and integrated with a map. The permanent address, trip origin, and destination are recorded as the nearest landmark on the map, and the location is shown as a marker on the map. The marker on the map can be adjusted to correct the location if required. A pilot study was conducted in Jaipur, and three different data collection approaches are attempted. The approaches are compared in terms of survey completion rate, survey completion time, and time-cost of each approach. The crowd-sourced web survey turns out to be the most efficient in terms of the time-cost per completed survey record and most suitable to collect a large number of survey records in an urban agglomeration.