This document summarizes Neal Lathia's presentation at Ubicomp 2011 about using smart card travel data to analyze Londoners' travel behaviors, perceptions, and responses to incentives. The presentation discusses comparing survey data on travelers' perceptions of their travel patterns and payments to their actual smart card usage data. It also analyzes how travel behaviors differ based on student discounts, daily travel caps, and mode of transportation. The goal is to explore how smart card data could be used for future ubiquitous computing applications and evaluating transportation policies.

1. @neal_lathia
dept. of computer science
university college london
ubicomp 2011

2. @neal_lathia
dept. of computer science
university college london
ubicomp 2011

6. the oyster card
a sensor carried by Londoners

7. the oyster card
beyond payment?
a sensor for science?

8. how smart is your smart card?
measuring travel behaviours, perceptions, and incentives

9. data vs. behaviour & perception

10. perception:
+ 25 question survey
data:
+ respondent oyster history
reference data:
+ 5%, 2 x 83-day sample
+ 100%, 1-month sample

11. trips taken
data
perception

12. travel time
proportion
time bin

13. perceived/data payment
payment
user

14. perceived/data payment
payment
user

15. payment vs. reference
compared to 3,379,570 transactions
(5% data set):
49.8% of transactions should fall into
this category.

16. data vs. behaviour & perception
+ estimating travel time > estimating travel needs
+ users inaccurately estimate payments
+ high usage of modalities that are “never used”
+ high proportion of travel to “non typical” stations

17. the oyster card
beyond payment?
a sensor for science?
future ubicomp applications?

18. data vs. travel incentives

19. mobility vs. student discounts
184,923 students
10,723,472 student trips
48,888,268 non-student trips

20. mobility vs. student discounts

21. mobility vs. student discounts
“... as a student with a flexible
timetable, it isn't always obvious
whether a travel card is a better deal
than pay as you go...”

22. mobility vs. daily capping
91,391,155 pay as you go trips
split into capped vs. non-capped
(free) (non-free)

23. mobility vs. daily capping
not-free: 54.83% trips by bus
free: 73.53% trips by bus

24. the oyster card
a tool to evaluate policy?
a sensor to test incentives?

26. N. Lathia, J. Froehlich, L. Capra. Mining Public Transport
Usage for Personalised Intelligent Transport Systems. In
IEEE ICDM 2010, Sydney, Australia, December 2010.
N. Lathia, L. Capra. Mining Mobility Data to Minimise
Travellers' Spending on Public Transport. In ACM KDD 2011,
San Diego, USA, August 2011.

27. how smart is your smart card?
measuring travel behaviours, perceptions, and incentives
@neal_lathia
dept. of computer science
university college london
ubicomp 2011