Trip Purposes of Automobile Users Inference Using Multi-day Traffic Monitoring Data

Determining trip purpose is an important link to explore travel rules. In this paper,we takea utomobile users in urban areas as the research object,combine unsupervised learning and supervised learningm ethods to analyze their travel characteristics,and focus on the classification and prediction of automobileu sers’trip purposes. However,previous studies on trip purposes mainly focused on questionnaires and GPSd ata,which cannot well reflect the characteristics of automobile travel. In order to avoid the multi-dayb ehavior variability and unobservable heterogeneity of individual characteristics ignored in traditional traffic questionnaires,traffic monitoring data from the Northern District of Qingdao are used,and the K-meansc lustering method is applied to estimate the trip purposes of automobile users. Then,Adaptive Boosting(AdaBoost)and Random Forest(RF)methods are used to classify and predict trip purposes. Finally,ther esult shows:(1)the purpose of automobile users can be mainly divided into four clusters,which includeC ommuting trips,Flexible life demand travel in daytime,Evening entertainment and leisure shopping,andT axi-based trips for the first three types of purposes,respectively;(2)the Random Forest method performss ignificantly better than AdaBoost in trip purpose prediction for higher accuracy;(3)the average predictiona ccuracy of Random Forest under hyper-parameters optimization reaches96.25%,which proves the feasibilitya nd rationality of the above clustering results.

ActivityNET:Neural networks to predict public transport trip purposes from individual smart card data and POIs

Predicting trip purpose from comprehensive and continuous smart card data is beneficial for transport and city planners in investigating travel behaviors and urban mobility.Here,we propose a framework,ActivityNET,using Machine Learning(ML)algorithms to predict passengers’trip purpose from Smart Card(SC)data and Points-of-Interest(POIs)data.The feasibility of the framework is demonstrated in two phases.Phase I focuses on extracting activities from individuals’daily travel patterns from smart card data and combining them with POIs using the proposed“activity-POIs consolidation algorithm”.Phase II feeds the extracted features into an Artificial Neural Network(ANN)with multiple scenarios and predicts trip purpose under primary activities(home and work)and secondary activities(entertainment,eating,shopping,child drop-offs/pick-ups and part-time work)with high accuracy.As a case study,the proposed ActivityNET framework is applied in Greater London and illustrates a robust competence to predict trip purpose.The promising outcomes demonstrate that the cost-effective framework offers high predictive accuracy and valuable insights into transport planning.

How has COVID-19 changed trip patterns by purpose in China?

COVID-19 has upended the whole world. Due to travel restrictions by governments and increased perceived risks of the disease, therehave been significant changes in social activities and travel patterns. This paper investigates the effects of COVID-19 on changes toindividuals’ travel patterns, particularly for travel purposes. An online questionnaire survey was conducted in China, which incorporatesquestions about individuals’ sociodemographic and travel characteristics in three different periods of COVID-19 (i.e. before theoutbreak, at the peak and after the peak;the peak here refers to the peak of the pandemic in China, between the end of January and1 May, 2020). The results show that trip frequency decreased sharply from the outbreak until the peak, and drastically increased afterthe peak. Nevertheless, the data fromthis study suggests that it has not fully recovered to the level before the outbreak. Subsequently,a series of random parameters bivariate Probit models for changes in travel patterns were estimated with personal characteristics.The findings demonstrate that during the peak of the pandemic, residents who did not live in more developed cities reached lowfrequencytravel patterns more quickly. For travel purposes, residents of Wuhan, China resumed travelling for work, entertainmentand buy necessities at a much higher rate than other cities. After the peak, students’ travel for work, entertainment and to buy necessitiesrecovered significantly faster than for other occupations. The findings would be helpful for establishing effective policies tocontrol individual travel and minimize disease spread in a possible future pandemic.