A Real-Time Data Dashboard for Monitoring Travel Behavior

Michael Allen, K. Shankari, Amarin Siripanich, Andrew Duvall, Taha Rashidi

Research output: NRELPoster

Abstract

When running a smartphone app-based travel behavior study, it is important to keep participants engaged in contributing data. Long study durations and/or large samples make it difficult to engage participants in reporting their travel behavior. We developed a dashboard web application called 'emdash' to facilitate and ease the data collection maintenance task. It allows deployers to view trip trajectories, track which participants are uploading data, and generate report ready plots. Emdash can also be useful for deployers to identify ways to best encourage a particular transportation mode shift and to provide feedback and reporting to participants. Using the dashboard, a single admin was able to support a classic travel study with 80 participants. The dashboard is currently deployed in a two-year electric bike (e-bike) pilot study called CanBikeCO, conducted in six locations across Colorado, USA. CanBikeCO targets carbon emissions reduction and equity improvement by evaluating changes to participants' travel behavior when they are offered free e-bikes. Each CanBikeCO location has access to their own version of emdash to help them monitor and support participants. After testing and gathering feedback, we made improvements to the dashboard's usability and scalability, and proposed a method to make detecting data issues easier. Improvements include configurable options and limiting the volume of data sent to the dashboard as study size and duration increase.
Original languageAmerican English
StatePublished - 2022

Publication series

NamePresented at the National Travel Monitoring Exposition and Conference (NaTMEC), 13-17 June 2022

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/PO-5400-83004

Keywords

  • data dashboard
  • data visualization
  • emdash
  • OpenPATH
  • travel monitoring

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