‘Mind the Gap’—The impact of discrepancies between Google Maps API and reported travel data in the Global South

Abstract

Over the past decade, online navigation services have been adopted increasingly as a source of ‘ground truth’ in estimating choice alternatives during travel behaviour. These services, including Google Maps, Bing Map, and Waze, which are designed to provide real time traffic information and navigation guidance to the users, are believed to offer comprehensive and precise information regarding travel attributes. Nevertheless, discrepancies between the travel attributes collected from those services and the travel data that is reported by the travellers may introduce a systematic bias into travel behaviour analysis and modelling. This paper attempts to explore this challenge by investigating the discrepancy between the reported travel times and costs and the corresponding values derived from the Google Maps API. The comparison is conducted in the context of a developing country, through the use of travel diary survey data from Greater Jakarta, where there is a greater variety of transport modes and individuals may have varying capacities to gauge travel attributes due to the unpredictability of traffic conditions. Results show that even minor adjustments to which observations are included and which specific attribute treatments are used can completely change values of travel time savings (VTTS) estimates. Further, the characteristics of the observations excluded in the process of pre-processing are investigated to provide insight into preventing loss of data in future mobility surveys. Recommendations to address both of these issues are discussed along with policy implications.