# Using Connected Vehicle Data to Evaluate National Trip Trends
## 9 Conclusions  
The current state of the practice of using travel surveys may suffer from inaccuracies and underreporting based on how well each respondent documents their trip length and duration and how the data is collected (telephone, online, or mail surveys). In fact, our CV data analysis may suggest that survey techniques overestimate actual trip length and duration (Figures 1 and 2). This is not surprising, since NHTS trip length is based upon  
Figure 9: Daily Trip Statistics for California (December 2022) (**a**) Mean Estimated Trip Length (**b**) Mean Trip Duration. the shortest path estimated by the Google Maps API between self-reported trip origins and destinations. This paper proposes scalable methodologies to monitor national trip trends using emerging CV trajectory data. Approximately 500 billion anonymized CV waypoint records for the month of December 2022 were aggregated into nearly 1 billion CV trip records for the entire United States. This data represents approximately 5% of the trips in the United States [22]. Trip characteristics such as duration, length, and vehicle type were estimated from the aggregated data (Figures 1 and 4, Table 2). Trip origins and destinations were linked to their respective census blockgroups to allow for efficient geographic aggregation. Summary CV trip statistics for the month were then compared with results obtained by the 2017 NHTS, which collected data from nearly 130,000 households between April 2016 and April 2017. * All ICEV trip length and trip duration statistics computed with CV data showed close agreement with the 2017 NHTS values (Tables 2 and 3, Figure 1). The mean values were within 7.8% and 6.6% of each other, respectively, while the 85 th percentile values were within 0.7% and 8.3%. * The share of trips by length (Figure 2) showed a close alignment between the two independent techniques, with values agreeing within 1.2% on average. * Visualizations demonstrating observed inter-state trip counts between US census places at the national level illustrated an expectedly high concentration of trips on the eastern seaboard (Figure 3). The methodologies and visualizations (Figures 6-9) presented by this analysis are scalable to any state or local level and offer substantial efficiency improvements in comparison to traditional survey-based methods. Future research in this space will involve a comparative analysis of results obtained from current survey methods at the national, state, and local levels with CV data to identify emerging opportunities for public sector stakeholders to work together with automotive OEMs and third-party commercial data providers toward more efficient and scalable techniques to document passenger vehicle travel patterns. Researchers may potentially find widespread and diverse uses of these methodologies and results in estimating travel demand, planning tourism and hospitality developments, planning transit systems, prioritizing locations when allocating funds for infrastructure improvements, and tracking vehicular emissions as well as energy consumption as the United States and countries around the world work actively towards a transition to electric vehicles in the near future. Conceptualization, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M., H.L. and D.M.B. ; Data curation, J.D., J.K.M. and H.L. ; Formal analysis, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M. and H.L. ; Funding acquisition, D.M.B. ; Investigation, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M. and D.M.B. ; Methodology, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M. and D.M.B. ; Project administration, D.M.B. ; Resources, H.L. and D.M.B. ; Supervision, D.M.B. ; Validation, J.D., J.K.M. and J.A.M. ; Visualization, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M. and D.M.B. ; Writing--original draft, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M. and D.M.B. ; Writing--review & editing, J.D., J.K.M., J.A.M., H.L. and D.M.B. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This study is based upon work supported by the ASPIRE award, an Engineering Research Center program by the National Science Foundation (NSF), grant no.