Combining smart card data and household travel survey to analyze jobs-housing relationships in Beijing

Location Based Services (LBS) provide a new perspective for spatiotemporally analyzing dynamic urban systems. Research has investigated urban dynamics using GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), GPS (Global Positioning System), SNS (Social Networking Services) and Wi-Fi techniques. However, less attention has been paid to the analysis of urban structure (especially commuting pattern) using smart card data (SCD), which are widely available in most cities. Additionally, ubiquitous LBS data, although providing rich spatial and temporal information, lacks rich information on the social dimension, which limits its in-depth application. To bridge this gap, this paper combines bus SCD for a one-week period with a one-day household travel survey, as well as a parcel-level land use map to identify job-housing locations and commuting trip routes in Beijing. Two data forms (TRIP and PTD) are proposed, with PTD used for jobs-housing identification and TRIP used for commuting trip route identification. The results of the identification are aggregated in the bus stop and traffic analysis zone (TAZ) scales, respectively. Particularly, commuting trips from three typical residential communities to six main business zones are mapped and compared to analyze commuting patterns in Beijing. The identified commuting trips are validated on three levels by comparison with those from the survey in terms of commuting time and distance, and the positive validation results prove the applicability of our approach. Our experiment, as a first step toward enriching LBS data using conventional survey and urban GIS data, can obtain solid identification results based on rules extracted from existing surveys or censuses.