August 2011 TechPlan Roundtable Minutes

ITS and Your Life

Roundtable, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, August 19, 2011.

Opening Remarks by Professor and Associate Dean Greg Lindsey, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota

Dr. Lindsey opens the roundtable by welcoming everyone and outlines the type of research projects that will be presented and their importance for improving transportation decision-making and helping to address current transportation problems more effectively, particularly given the fiscal challenges transportation agencies are currently facing.  Dr. Lindsey notes that Prof. Max Donath will be joining the roundtable remotely.

Presentation sessions are moderated by Jan Lucke from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies

Jan Lucke provides background information on the University of Minnesota’s ITS Institute and outlines the format of the roundtable.  Each presentation of research will be started by presenting the audience with a couple of “brainstorming” questions for the audience to discuss for 5 minutes with their tablemates in order to facilitate conversation about the upcoming presentations.  Brief reactions will then be gathered from each table before the presentations commence.

Presentation #1

SMARTPHONE-BASED TRAVEL EXPERIENCE SAMPLING AND BEHAVIOR INTERVENTION AMONG YOUNG ADULTS (UBIACTIVE PHASE I) by Yingling Fan, Assistant Professor, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

Brainstorming Questions:

What data is most critical to understanding the well-being effects of travel behavior and the types of transportation systems that may improve travelers’ well-being?

Are daily and weekly reports powerful enough to encourage participants to reflect on their travel behavior? Any additional contents that could be included as part of the intervention?

Quick Audience Reactions:

Prof. David Levinson notes that a challenge in this research may be the difficulty in defining “well-being” across individuals given the inherent subjectivity of the concept.

Presentation

Dr. Fan’s project investigates how smart phone technology can be used to study individual travel behavior as well as create intervention opportunities to promote healthier modes of travel.  The specific objectives of the research are to 1) design an Android smart phone application (called “UbiActive”) that collects information on the travel behavior and experiences of users; and 2) apply UbiActive in a 3-week field study to test its operation as well as to assess the potential for the application to provide a tool for intervening in travel behavior in order to encourage healthier travel practices.

Dr. Fan outlines the close connection between an individual’s transportation decisions and their health, and the great potential for improving physical activity levels by altering travel behavior to include more walking and bike riding.  She then notes the gaps in existing public health research on what the actual impact of travel behavior is on health and well-being.  This gap is in part due to the difficulty in collecting real-time data on travel, health and well-being. UbiActive is meant to address this gap. 

Prof. Fan describes the details of UbiActive’s monitoring and sensing capacity and the travel information it will collect from smart phone users: location, movement time, speed, acceleration and orientation.  From this information, measurements of physical activity and trip modes can be derived.   She goes on to describe the capacity of UbiActive to conduct an experience-based survey of travelers.  When UbiActive detects that a trip has been completed, it will prompt the respondent to answer survey questions about their travel mode, experience and well-being.  Prof. Fan notes the difficulty her research team has confronted in pilot testing in defining individual “trips”, as well as handling the failure of users to answer survey questions they are prompted to answer.

Next, Prof. Fan discusses the ability of UbiActive to summarize the data collected and provide daily reports to users.  These reports summarize a user’s travel experience, physical activity and well-being.   Prof. Fan then outlines how the application can provide information to users comparing their levels of travel-related physical activity and their travel experiences with those of other users. Lastly, Prof. Fan outlines the design of a three-week field study that will test the application in the real world environment.

Because Prof. Fan is still in the midst of her research, she could not provide definitive conclusions.   But she did note that her research so far does show that Android smart phones are suitable for tracking individual travel behavior and physical activity.

Peer reviewer Susan Handy notes the importance of this project for testing the use of smart phones for data collection as well as for the potential for smart phones to be tools for intervention with respect to travel behavior.  She points out that the smart phone approach outlined by Dr. Fan has the potential to not only collect real-time travel data but also to provide data on why people make the travel choices they do.  She comments, though, that asking the right questions in the UbiActive travel surveys may be the most challenging part of the project (e.g., how to separate a person’s general well-being from their travel related well-being.)

Peer review Randall Guensler comments on the difficulties that the particulars of individual cell-phone types will present for data-collection in this research and how these difficulties may change over time with individual cell-phone providers.  As a result, he recommends using only one type of smart phone for the study.  He then notes this type of travel data will take a long-time to analyze, particularly for quality assurance.  Finally, he comments on the challenge of respondent burden and thus suggests eliminating unnecessary inquiries to respondents in the study.

Presentation #2

ITS AND TRANSPORTATION SAFETY:  EMS SYSTEM DATA INTEGRATION TO IMPROVE TRAFFIC CRASH EMERGENCY RESPONSE AND TREATMENT – PHASE IV by Tom Horan and Ben Schooley, Claremont Graduate University.

Brainstorming Questions:

How can mobile and web technologies be used to improve the quality and level of care provided to motor vehicle crash victims through improved information coordination between Emergency Response and Emergency Rooms?

To what extent does CrashHelp have the potential to facilitate this coordination, and what technical and organizational factors need to be considered to ensure its success?

Quick Audience Reactions:

An audience member comments on how the more information an emergency room receives prior to the arrival of a crash victim, faster and better decisions about the care of that victim can be taken once the victim arrives at the hospital.

Presentation

Prof. Horan describes the chief aim of this research as improving the use of technology in Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems.   Improving the effectiveness of EMS is important for the transportation system given the cost of vehicle accidents in terms of injuries, lives and money.  There are 35,000 traffic fatalities every year and 60% occur on rural roads. Information flows in EMS are important not only for improving care but also for the analysis and planning work of EMS managers and hospital administrators.

In the EMS system, one of the biggest information gaps is between EMS providers and the hospital receiving the patient.   This research focuses on developing a system called CrashHelp to facilitate the hand-off of the patient between EMS providers and the receiving hospital. CrashHelp consists both of an application for EMS medics to input data on a mobile device, as well as web-server technology so that the data from these mobile devices can be routed to and be used by the receiving hospital.

Ben Schooley gives a demonstration of how CrashHelp works. When a new incident occurs, an EMS medic can use CrashHelp to take pictures, record audio notes, note basic patient information and indicators, and identify the geographic location of the crash. This information is then sent electronically to the emergency room of the receiving hospital.   Studies have shown that only approximately 40% of EMS deliveries to hospitals involve an actual verbal exchange of information about the patient between EMS personal and hospital personnel.  CrashHelp seeks to improve this exchange of information.   Mr. Schooley then highlights the encryption technology that CrashHelp uses to protect patient privacy, as well as the application’s employment of GIS technology to map incidents and generate expected times of arrival for hospital emergency rooms.

Mr. Schooley then outlines the pilot testing of CrashHelp in Idaho and the challenges in getting the pilot set-up.  The pilot test will be an important step in evaluating the technology and gaining feedback from practitioners.   It will also help address the important question of how practitioners will actually use the system and the extent to which it can improve decision-making, both at the time of care as well as by hospital managers with respect to the utilization of hospital resources. 

Peer reviewer Tim Held comments that the major advancement presented by CrashHelp is its ability to transmit audio and images from EMS medics to receiving hospitals.  These features help the medics paint a more accurate picture of the situation of the incoming patient.  In terms of challenges for CrashHelp, Mr. Held notes that the application needs to avoid having EMS medics duplicate any data entry between CrashHelp and the EMS reports they must complete (e.g., pre-populate EMS record forms with the data collected through CrashHelp).  Lastly, Mr. Held notes he foresees CrashHelp having application beyond just vehicular crashes.

Peer reviewer Dia Gainor comments on how time-sensitive information and the provision of care are in the EMS context and how CrashHelp has the potential to improve the speed of the flow of information from EMS personnel to emergency rooms.  She then discusses how CrashHelp will need to confront the issue of having multiple EMS agencies touching the same incident as that creates complications for information transfers.

Presentation #3

ITS DATA NEEDS:  HOW MUCH DO WE REALLY NEED TO KNOW? by Frank Douma, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

Brainstorming Questions:

Should developers and implementers of ITS Technologies consider questions of who will see and use data about where and when a person travels?

How might dialogue between privacy advocates and the ITS Community be increased?  Enhanced?

Quick Audience Reactions:

An audience member comments how privacy concerns can have a real impact on the deployment of transportation technology, as exhibited by the concerns with auto enforcement technology in Minnesota.

Presentation

Mr. Douma reviews his previous research on ITS data collection and privacy, and the framework this research has generated for analyzing the apparent conflict between ITS data collection and privacy.  Among other things, this research has highlighted that the more anonymous the ITS data collected the fewer privacy problems that will likely arise.  Similarly, fewer privacy problems will likely arise if transportation users “opt-in” to having their travel data collected (e.g., toll-tag collectors) since they are thus presumptively consenting to such data collection.  This previous research has also shown that public perception of the privacy implications of ITS is just as important as the actual privacy law aspects.   Public acceptance of ITS data collection can be furthered by using “opt-in” scenarios when possible, as well as ITS operators being clear with the public about why the data is being collected.

Mr. Douma then outlines the structure of privacy law in the U.S.  He describes how the law is currently in a period of change as technological advances challenge the framework created by existing statutes and case law.  A current case before the Supreme Court, U.S. v Jones, regarding the placement of a wireless GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car by law enforcement without a warrant, is representative of new technologies presenting a challenge to the current structure of privacy law.  Privacy law is also in flux as a result of the number of legislative efforts in the offering, both at the state and federal levels, to respond to public concerns about privacy in light of new technological developments.   Despite these challenges to privacy law on the horizon, Mr. Douma does not think they will affect a key consideration for ITS, which is that the collection of non-personally identifiable information does not typically raise privacy problems

Then Mr. Douma discusses how privacy is generally not a priority issue for ITS developers and operators, and as a result ITS technologies can hit roadblocks created by privacy concerns that may have been avoided if the privacy issues had been confronted earlier in the process.   The aim of Mr. Douma’s current research is to generate a conversation between the ITS community and the privacy community so that these potential roadblocks can be identified and perhaps avoided.   Specifically, the research will assess what the specific data needs are for certain stakeholders in the ITS community and see if there is common ground with those stakeholders concerned about the privacy implications of ITS.

Peer reviewer Barbara Wendling notes that the ITS development community is sensitive to privacy concerns, for among other reasons, that consumers will not want to buy products if they have objections over how those product may facilitate the collection of information they think is private.  

Peer reviewer Dorothy Glancy comments on how important a stakeholder auto-manufacturers are for ITS and privacy issues.   She also notes that because of technological changes there is not a clear dichotomy between what is personally identifiable information and what is non-personally identifiable information.   It is now more of a spectrum between anonymous and personal identifiable information because of advances in re-identification technology.

Prof. Susan Handy comments that transportation planners can do much of their forecasting with anonymous data, but data that can be linked to certain travel characteristics is needed to do things like travel demand forecast modeling.   She is concerned that privacy concerns may foreclose some of the new data collection approaches and make planners continue to rely on older forms of data collection, like sampling.

Prof.  Tom Horan comments that there may be lessons for the transportation system in how the health care system addresses the privacy issues with patient medical data.  He also notes advances in synthetic data which may help address issues with the re-identification of anonymous data.

Presentation #4

CONSUMER TRAVEL BEHAVIOR AND RETAIL GEOGRAPHY:  A MICROSCOPIC INVESTIGATION USING GPS DATA AND PARCEL-LEVEL LAND USE by David Levinson and Arthur Huang, University of Minnesota.

Brainstorming Questions:

What land use factors are conducive to travelers’ destination choice in non-work trips?

What kinds of road network structures make a destination more attractive?

Quick Audience Reactions:

Prof. Fan notes that a person’s preferred mode of transportation, such as car or public transportation would be a factor in their destination choices for non-work trips.  She also comments that a location with more than one attraction may be more attractive than a location with only one attraction.

Presentation

Mr. Huang first discusses the CLUSTER simulation module they have build as part of their research project.  CLUSTER is an acronym for “Cluster Location of Urban Services, Transport and Economic Resources”.   The model is a web-based simulation program.  The model is a tool to look at retail distribution in urban areas and to test urban policies and the planning of commercial areas.   Mr. Huang then demonstrates how the model works with different scenarios for types of retailers and competition conditions, and the process by which a clustering of retailers in an urban area is achieved. 

Mr. Huang then turns to the questions of how the clustering of services in an urban area affects non-work travel behavior and how the road structure system affects destination choice for non-work travel.  To analyze these questions, this study used GPS data from vehicles, containing origination, destination and travel-time information.   Mr. Huang then shows samples of the results from the empirical analysis of the data.  Overall, the results from the analysis show that: travel time has the strongest influence on a traveler’s destination; higher walking accessibility makes a destination more attractive; a destination that can be reached by a more direct route or a route with more homogenous road segments is more attractive; and walking accessibility and heterogeneous services at a particular location are highly correlated.

Lastly, Mr. Huang outlines the future direction of their research on this project.  This included expanding their sample size of GPS data and measuring other land use and road network features, such as the number of red lights and parking availability.   The ultimate objective of this research is to develop a conceptual model to explain how travel behavior and accessibility are connected from the aggregate perspective. 

Peer reviewer Jonathan Ehrlich comments on the value of this research for transportation forecasters.  He notes that this research reflects how complicated route choices are, more complicated than most forecasting accounts for.    Likewise, the research shows the importance of considering how road network features affect travel choices.  

Peer reviewer Susan Handy notes that there has been relatively little research, in the transportation field, on shopping and destination choice and this project fits within that gap.  Further, it is important research as many regions try to reduce the amount of driving through urban planning.   The affect of distance and road network design on travel destination choice is an important consideration for these planning activities.  

Dr. Fan comments that the duration of a traveler’s stay at a particular location may be an additional factor that the researchers may want to consider as their research moves forward.

Prof. Donath asks whether the reliability of travel time on a given route should be an additional parameter that is considered in this research.  Prof. Levinson responds that the data is available to address route-time reliability as an explanatory factor and the next step in this research may include it.

Closing Remarks by Lee Munnich, Senior Fellow and Director, State and Local Policy Program, Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota

Mr. Munnich closes the roundtable by thanking everyone for their participation and hard-work in making the roundtable a success.  He remarks that the purpose of the TechPlan program is to focus on the intersection of technology, transportation, planning and public policy.   In this light, he then summarizes the main objective of the individual research projects presented and points out their common themes: how can we use new technologies to better understand and plan our transportation systems, and yet what are the social limits that we as a society are going to place on these technologies.  Mr. Munnich concludes that technology and transportation is an exciting area of research now, and the feeling from the research projects presented today is that we are at the beginning of a journey rather than at an end.