Estimating long-distance travel demand with mobile phone billing data

Abstract

Analysis of long-distance travel demand has become more relevant in recent times. The reason is the growing share of tra c induced by journeys related to remote activities, which are not part of daily life. In today’s mobile world, these journeys are responsible for almost 50 percent of the overall tra c. Traditionally, surveys have been used to gather data needed for the analysis of travel demand. Due to the high response burden and memory issues, respondents are known to underreport the number of journeys. The question of the real number of long-distance journeys remains unanswered without additional data sources. This paper shows how an alternative data source, mobile phone billing data, can be used to estimate long-distance travel demand. We take a sample of mobile phone billing data covering 5 months, reconstructed long-distance tours and imputed purposes. The latter was done based on a national travel survey.