About
Meet the developer
TripLibre is built and maintained by one person: a transportation researcher who wanted a travel survey of their own life, without handing that data to anyone else.
Hi, I'm Zhanchao
I grew up in Qingdao, a coastal city in eastern China, and came to the United States for college in 2020. A world geography class at Binghamton University and a planning course taught by a county planning director turned a childhood love of maps into a career question: why are places the way they are, and who decided?
Today I work on transportation, urban planning and spatial analytics. I study how policies and changing urban conditions reshape the way people travel, using travel surveys, causal inference and a lot of maps. Outside research I travel slowly: walking, riding transit, and spending more time in airports than a normal person should.
Why I built TripLibre
Much of my research leans on household travel surveys, the one- or two-day trip diaries agencies use to understand how a region moves. They are invaluable and also limited: short, expensive, and dependent on memory. I wanted the same diary for myself, kept continuously and accurately enough to analyse.
The apps that already do this are run by companies, charge subscriptions, upload your location history, or all three. Location data is too revealing for that. So TripLibre is built on a few non-negotiables:
- Local-first. No account, no server, no sync. The data never leaves the phone unless you export it.
- Survey-shaped. Trips, modes and purposes follow survey conventions, so the export drops straight into pandas or R. How accurate it is gets measured and published, limits included.
- Honest about uncertainty. The app tells you when it's unsure and makes fixing it one tap.
- Open. Anyone can read the code, check the privacy claims, or fork it for their own study.
The flights feature exists for a slightly less academic reason: I really like airports.
Questions I keep returning to
TripLibre sits right at the first question: a personal, continuous record of how one person's travel responds to the places, schedules and systems around them.
It started as a travel survey of one. The hope is that the same open, local-first approach can make basic travel data collection affordable for students, small agencies and community researchers too. That part is still a plan; the Vision and Roadmap pages say what exists today and what doesn't.
Say hello
Found a bug, built something on top of the export, or using TripLibre in a study? I'd love to hear about it.
For bugs and feature requests, please use GitHub issues so others can follow along. See Contributing if you'd like to help.