Development of a lightweight and easy-to-use smartphone application for traffic data collection :|EZDatCol

Abstract

Data analyses in transportation engineering require large amounts of recent traf fic data of high quality, which are often unavailable. Conventional data collection methods such as in-vehicle GPS trackers are time-consuming and costly, which post pone the data analyses. These methods also often require additional training for the drivers, which delays the analysis parts even more. EZDatCol (Easy Data Collector) is a lightweight and easy-to-use Android application that can start collecting traffic data immediately after the APK file is distributed. As the application was designed to be compatible with Android devices of varying computing power and to be used all day long, the system demand of EZDatCol was set very low. EZDatCol collects GPS data continuously along with optional traffic data such as the number of passen gers and stores collected data in an online database. In addition to the smartphone application, a Python-based toolkit was developed to automatize processing collected data. The functionality of the application and the data processing toolkit was tested in three case studies. The results of the case studies indicate that the application can successfully collect continuous traffic data for varying transport mode, duration, and distances. The Python-based toolkit also showed its usefulness in quickly processing big traffic data and exporting relevant spreadsheets, graphs, and maps to be examined by the traffic analysts. The Android application and the data processing toolkit can be easily implemented by future studies to be used during traffic data collection and processing.