Recording and understanding multi- and intermodal mobility - a review

The transition to sustainable mobility requires detailed knowledge of actual mobility behavior. Recording mobility behavior through conventional, aggregated, or retrospective survey methods (e.g., counting stations, travel diaries) may yield incomplete insights. In addition, these methods are often expensive, prone to error, or not scalable. The aim of this literature review is to provide a systematic overview of the current state of the literature on recording and analysis of individual mobility data and, based on this, to identify possible research gaps and potential. The exploratory literature review includes social science surveys on multi- and intermodal mobility behavior, as well as an overview of possible ways to analyze travel data. The focus of the latter is on identifying relevant data sources and methodological approaches for segmentation, identification of transport mode, and trip purpose determination. Results from recent studies show that sensor-based data collection alone is not sufficient to fully and accurately map mobility behavior. One possible solution is a “best-of-both-worlds” approach that combines passive, automatic mobility data collection via smartphone sensors with targeted user corrections and additions (“human-in-the-loop”) within an app. The literature review shows that this approach yields the best data quality. Combining mobility surveys with passive collection of mobility data provides a comprehensive, accurate, and complete overview of mobility behavior.