Mobile phone trip matrices are not all born the same

More and more trip matrices for transport modelling are being built with mobile phone network data. But, as Luis Willumsen of Kineo-Analytics explains, understanding both the strengths and limitations of this data is essential for a successful modelling project

Luis Willumsen

06 December 2019

The process of creating trip matrices from mobile phone data

A comparison from Chile of trip matrices based on a household travel survey (top) and mobile phone data (bottom). Note the number of empty (blue) cells in the former and their absence in the latter

The use of trip matrices based on mobile phone network data (MND) has become a practical proposition in many countries. They are frequently used in the US and Spain and also in the UK through projects such as EDMOND for Transport for London (‘Estimating Demand using MObile Network Data’).

There are some good reasons for this interest in mobile phone trip matrices. They offer the potential to overcome some of the limitations of current travel data collection methods at a...