A Smart Card Transaction “Travel Diary” to Assess the Accuracy of the Montréal Household Travel Survey

Abstract This paper proposes to use a smart-card (SC) based “travel diary” to assess the accuracy of a household travel survey (HTS) in which respondents are not asked to provide their smart card number. Using a single day of travel survey data, a methodology based on spatiotemporal filters applied to declared travel patterns is able to match roughly half of transit-using survey respondents with at least one smart card. In cases where a match is possible, preliminary comparison of travel patterns as measured by SC with those measured by the HTS reveals three singular types of traveller survey response.