T Travel Behavior: Understanding Travel Choice in Modes and Routes from GIS Data Hoang Nguyen and Chen Cai Data61 - CSIRO, Eveleigh, NSW, Australia Definition This study focuses on investigating the travel demand using GIS data from a predominant car share company in Australia. Car share is currently the fast-growing travel mode in addition to tradi- tional means such as bus, train, taxi, and private car. This mode is considered as more convenient than car rental, cheaper than owning a car, and more friendly to the environment. The service is defined as providing cars that have no “home,” and membership gives anytime self-service ac- cess to thousands of cars in the metropolitan area. The car share companies are working on how to better map members to cars and demand to supply, and they are also developing systems to manage a large number of vehicles. Under- standing the usage patterns and routes from GIS data can improve car share service management system and business model. Historical Background The concept of car sharing was known as “com- munity garages” and introduced by (Fishman and Wabe 1969) in 1969. It was proposed as a solution to the parking and traffic congestion problem in the metropolitan areas. The first suc- cessful large-scale car-sharing system was Mo- bility Switzerland (1987) which is still one of the most popular car-sharing enterprises in the world (Millard-Ball 2005). Over a few years later, this program was rapidly developed in other European countries such as Germany, the Nether- lands, and Austria. Despite its success in Europe, the car share concept was relatively slow to be implemented in North America until Carshar- ing Portland (USA) founded in 1998. In 2004, Schwieger estimated that the total member all over the world is approximately 200,000 with an annual increase of 20–30 % (Schwieger 2004). Until the end of 2012, this figure increased to 1.7 million as reported by the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at U.C. Berkeley (Shaheen and Cohen 2013). Recent innovations in information technology and geographic information system (GIS) have transformed the operation of the car share industry. Many car share companies have equipped their cars with GPS devices in order to ensure real-time tracking of their vehicles and to © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 S. Shekhar et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of GIS, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_1614-1