Title: Household Travel Surveys: Who within the Household Do You Survey and Does it Matter?
Abstract: Household travel surveys inform the transportation planning process and are typically conducted about once every 10 years, based on the region’s long-range planning horizon and the availability of funding. Smaller urban areas may conduct these surveys even less frequently, due mainly to funding constraints. While all surveys collect the basic trip details of origin, destination, travel times, trip purpose, and mode, the surveys vary greatly in terms of who provides travel details. Some regions focus only on travel by those ages 16 and older in the households; others collect travel from those ages 5 and older, but increasingly, regions are collecting travel from all household members regardless of age. This trend towards complete snapshots of household travel patterns is driven by modeling advances that call for intra-household details. One approach to balance the need for new data against limited funding is to survey only a portion of the household members. While the larger regions surveyed all household members regardless of age, smaller regions coped through conducting surveys that obtained travel details only from members age 5 and older or those ages 16 and older. Most models built using this partial data are “3-step” models that focus only on vehicle trips. Thus trips for children are of secondary importance and dropped when prioritizing budgets (Gresham 2008, Bricka and Tinkler 2004). However, as these regions grow, they will either need to conduct new surveys or to impute trips for children using the survey data itself or other available data (such as the national household travel survey). The purpose of this paper is threefold: to review the literature regarding children’s travel in order to understand the extent to which it influences household travel patterns, to document the state of modeling practice to understand why this data is needed, and finally, to present design considerations to help minimize the cost of conducting a travel survey of all household members, or, if a partial survey is conduct now, identify the “pegs” to help with imputing children’s travel in future years.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot