Trip Distribution Modeling Using Mobile Phone Data: Emphasis on Intra-Zonal Trips

The development of a trip distribution model requires a massive data collection task, such as expensive travel surveys to identify trip makers’ origin and destination zones. Intra-zonal trips are usually ignored in the development of trip distribution models because of the difficulty associated with measuring travel costs. However, ignoring intra-zonal trips leads to incomplete model estimation especially when the zone size is large, and thus, the number of intra-zonal trips is substantial. This is especially important, with the growing interest around the world on creating more walkable and bikeable cities where a high share of those trips is intra-zonal. In this paper, we use mobile phone data to derive country-wide mobility trends. A set of doubly constrained trip distribution models that integrates intra-zonal trips was estimated for 123-district-level traffic analysis zones. We present two approaches to estimate the intra-zonal travel costs measured in terms of trip distance. Our analysis reveals that the average intra-zonal trip distances obtained from the two approaches provide different levels of sensitivity to the distance-decay effect. Our result also shows that model estimation in the absence of intra-zonal trips produces biased estimates.