Relationships between mobile phone usage and activity-travel behavior

Abstract

Almost everyone has a mobile phone today. In addition to calls and text messages, people are utilizing mobile apps and websites to connect to the world and explore different content anytime and anywhere. The use of smart phones generates billions of records, including spatiotemporal trajectories, and various mobile phone usage details, such as call duration, and frequency of visiting a certain type of website. Most transportation researchers have only focused on spatiotemporal traces, which represent activity-travel behavior of users. However, it is worth making full use of smart phone data to study how mobile phone usage is related to activity-travel behavior. This chapter first reviews the existing literature on the relevant topics to demonstrate the lack of research on the relationship between mobile internet usage and activity-travel behavior. Based on an 11-day dataset from Shanghai that includes not only spatiotemporal traces but also the frequencies of browsing different categories of mobile internet content (e.g., tourism and finance), we examine several relationships between mobile internet usage and activity-travel behavior.