Participants weren’t fazed by the weather at a day-long workshop “Smartphone Travel Surveys & the Itinerum™ Platform” given by Professor Zachary Patterson of Concordia University at UofT on Friday, June 23.
Some thirty registrants from transportation organizations, nonprofits, research centres, universities, and municipal and regional governments were keen to learn about the free Itinerum™ Mobile App and Web Platform.
Opening remarks were given by UTTRI Director Eric Miller, Bilal Farooq of Ryerson University, and workshop leader Zachary Patterson.
Next, previous studies using the Itinerum™ app were presented by Professor Patterson. UofT’s Professor Steven Farber followed with his presentation “Transport Inaccessibility as a Barrier to Participation: The Case of Toronto’s Suburban Towers.”
Attendees learned how to use the platform and set up their own travel surveys.
The group collected its own travel data on the app by going to Ryerson’s Student Learning Centre for a picnic lunch.
Collected data was accessed and analyzed using the Itinerum™ Platform in the afternoon session.
The Toronto workshop was hosted by UTTRI at the University of Toronto’s Lassonde Mining Building in the Goldcorp Mining Innovation Suite.
Further Itinerum™ Platform workshops, in Vancouver and St. John’s, are planned for fall 2017.
What is Itinerum™?
The open Itinerum™ platform enables researchers to create their own free smartphone travel survey applications. With Itinerum™, it’s easy to create smartphone travel surveys and questionnaires for learning about:
- Travel mode
- Routes travelled
- Travel duration
Travel survey apps help solve some of the problems of traditional travel survey collection methods, such as low participation from young people and inaccuracy of data reported during interviews. The Itinerum™ platform makes it simple to develop free travel survey apps and access, manage and process the data.
Background
Developed at the Concordia University Transportation Research for Integrated Planning, or TRIP, Lab, the platform is new, though the Itinerum™ app (previously DataMobile) has been used in:
- large scale studies (Vancouver, Edmonton, Montreal, Toronto and Halifax) (the Canada Food Study)
- Montreal (for the City of Montreal)
- Concordia University in Montreal
- Toronto (University of Toronto)
- Accra in Ghana
It will be used in 2017 in projects with transportation planning authorities in Montreal including:
- Agence métropolitaine de transport (AMT)
- Société des transports de Montréal (STM)
- provincial ministry of transport (MTMDET)
- Montreal’s bike-share system (BIXI)
- University of Toronto Scarborough
- Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS)
Links