An open-source interactive travel diary for web-based trip reporting

Travel diaries are a state-of-the-art method to capture peoples’ travel behavior. However, traditional approaches are burdensome for respondents resulting in fatigue and attrition, whereas new methods such as GPS-tracking are costly and fraught with issues of respondents’ privacy of personal data. In this paper, we present an interactive, web-based travel diary, that improves the reporting process while minimizing efforts for survey designers. In a pilot study we show that the approach ensures to record detailed spatial trip information, but still guarantees respondents’ data privacy. The open-source design allows a cost-efficient integration in any survey engine that supports HTML and JavaScript.