Tsukuba City, located northeast of the Metropolitan area, is one of the most advanced world-class science cities in Japan. The new railway, called Tsukuba Express, started running in August, 2005. Tsukuba Express directly connects Tsukuba to Tokyo in 45 minutes. It is assumed that the opening of this railway would have an effect on both individual travel-behavior and traffic level-of-services in Tsukuba. In this study, the authors analyze the impact of Tsukuba Express based on individual activity data obtained by a traffic survey method that combines GPS-equipped cell phones and WWW-based travel diary system via the Internet. Measuring his/her trajectory in time-space dimension is one of the features of this survey method. This method also enables long-term traffic surveys, because there are few burdens of monitors compared with ones of paper-based survey. In addition to trajectory, the trip purpose, traffic mode, departure/arrival facilities and so on were collected. About 70 monitors participated in this survey during an approximately two-month period. The report examines its timesaving effect and its improvement of time-reliability from Tsukuba to Tokyo. Traffic problems around Tsukuba that emerged through the survey are also discussed. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E214938.
Abstract