Using Connected Vehicle Data to Evaluate National Trip Trends

The National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), conducted by the Federal Highway
Administration, has historically been used for documenting personal mobility trends. Current
techniques using surveys to collect this data are labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Emerging
connected vehicle (CV) data can provide an alternative data source to potentially provide a more
scalable method to measure the temporal and spatial usage of passenger vehicles in near realtime.

With an impending shift in the automobile industry towards alternative fuel vehicles (AFV),
agile monitoring of trip trends is important to help guide state and national investments in AFV
infrastructure. This study presents methodologies and visualizations summarizing observed trip
characteristics using a sample of more than 500 billion CV records and nearly 1 billion CV trips for
December 2022 in the United States. The analysis found very close agreement between trip lengths for
internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV) for CVs and those reported by the 2017 NHTS. Mean trip
lengths and trip durations from CVs and NHTS for ICEVs are within 7.8% and 6.6% of each other. The
85th percentile comparison was similarly close, within 0.7% and 8.3%. A comparison of trip trends
among states for ICEVs and AFVs as well as US census places and temporal trends for a selection of
states, including Indiana, Texas, Wyoming, and California, is provided. The paper concludes that CV
data is an important source to monitor trip characteristics across ICEVs and AFVs in near real-time,
which will be particularly important to track during the anticipated change to AFVs.