The Mobility Dashboard (TMD)

Keywords:

Dashboard, Mobility, Travel Behavior

Thrust Area(s):

Data Modeling and Analytic Tools, Understanding User Needs

University Lead:

Arizona State University

The transportation landscape is undergoing rapid and far-reaching change, fueled by emerging technologies, shifting work arrangements, demographic transitions, and evolving lifestyles and consumer attitudes. These developments are challenging long-standing assumptions in transportation planning – particularly those related to the stability of travel behavior, the predictability of demand, and the foundational drivers of mobility choices. As daily life becomes increasingly dynamic and multi-centered, the ability to monitor mobility trends in a timely and nuanced manner is more critical than ever. Traditional household travel surveys, while serving as the blueprint for most transportation planning and decision-making activities, are either infrequently collected or limited in scope. For example, they rarely capture in-home activity time allocation or detailed information about the sequencing of activities surrounding travel episodes – elements that are essential for understanding how, when, and why travel takes place. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which provides continuous, nationally representative daily activity/travel and time use diaries since 2003, offers a valuable (yet underused) resource for contextualizing emerging mobility patterns within broader, full-day activity and time-use structures. However, leveraging ATUS to extract insights into travel behavior requires extensive technical expertise and custom effort. This project proposes to develop an interactive, web-based platform that makes ATUS travel episode data more accessible, interpretable, and actionable for a broad range of users. Called The Mobility Dashboard (TMD), the platform will offer dedicated pages for trip purposes, travel modes, zero-trip days, and trip chaining structures, with capabilities for both person- and trip-level analysis. It will enable segmentation by demographic attributes and facilitate trend analysis over time. This project will also serve as one of the dashboards within the TBD Center’s broader Travel Behavior Data (TBD) Hub initiative, thereby expanding the field’s capacity to interpret mobility shifts and support responsive, evidence-based planning.

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