The trip is a key concept to travel behaviour research, and implicit from the travel survey instrument. However, with the transition to emerging, tracking-based technologies, the number of trips recorded is dramatically increased. While this is partly due to less underreporting in tracking-based methods, the implementation of the trip definition is also fundamentally different from the traditional definition: the latter depends on the qualitative concept of “purpose”, while digital implementations use heuristics such as dwell time to assess whether a trip has ended. This leads to inconsistencies between surveys. This paper is based on experiences from Norway in both the Norwegian National Travel Survey (a CAWI/CATI survey), and parallel data collections with the travel survey app TravelVu. In this paper we give an overview of typical problematic trips which challenge the traditional definition and the tracking-based trip identification, discuss why the problems occur and their consequences, suggest requirements which an improved definition should fulfil, and suggest a revised trip definition.
Tørset et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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