Mobile communication and positioning technologies including the Global Positioning System (GPS), the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) and Radio Data System (RDS) have advanced rapidly and their costs are decreasing. They demonstrate great potential as survey instruments for tracking individual mobility and travel behaviour, by enabling to conduct surveys for longer periods and providing more accurate data on the spatial and temporal frameworks of travels. Beside these improvements, the utilisation of new technologies may reduce respondent burden and the survey cost which should have first-class impacts on data accuracy and quality.

Moreover, the relatively low burden for the respondent allows substantially extended survey duration: at least one week with GPS, compared to one day with the conventional questionnaire. We took the opportunity of the French National Travel Survey to have the first nationwide experience with embedding such a “GPS package” in a traditional survey, with a sub-sample of approximately 750 voluntary interviewees. The main problem is that, those who are willing to participate in a GPS based-survey have a particular profile e.g. GPS survey participation is positively correlated with higher education, higher income and therefore higher access to cars and greater mobility. This means that when we ask interviewees to use new technologies in surveys we should face non-ignorable nonresponse.