The Influence of Social Contacts and Communication Use on Travel Behavior: A Smartphone-Based Study

This paper explores the potential of a smartphone database to investigate influences on travel behavior. The aim is to exploit the rich individual-level data available from the smartphone to study the influence of communication and social contacts (collected via phone call and short message service (SMS) logs) on spatial movement (collected via Global Positioning System (GPS)). An advantage of smartphone data is the ability to collect such rich data without user input over a long period of time, and the disadvantages is the difficulty associated with processing the data. The authors work with three months of data from 111 people collected via a snowball sample. In studying travel behavior, the focus is on high level measures of mobility as represented by the size of activity space and travel intensity (the dependent variables). Explanatory variables used include sociodemographics, spatial relationship between home and work, use of communication (number of phone calls and SMS), and the travel behavior of those in the sample who are connected to the respondent (where connectivity is measured by phone and SMS contact). These variables were processed from the smartphone data and present estimation results from the regression analysis. People tend to travel in a similar manner as those they are socially connected to (consistent with the social network and travel literature) and that communication use is a complement to physical travel (consistent with the telecommunication and travel literature). The results, although preliminary, illustrate how smartphone data can be exploited to reveal complex features of travel behavior, even when they are not collected for travel behavior purpose.