Continuous Improvement in Regional Household Travel Surveys

Funding constraints limit the ability of local and state agencies to fund quality data collection efforts. At the same time, public agencies that oversee transportation programs must support planning and policy making with empirical data. As a result, transportation data users and suppliers are consistently pressed to find better, faster, and cheaper ways of collecting data. Thus, continuous improvement in travel survey data methods, procedures, and tools is an imperative, not a luxury. This paper presents the implementation and results of a continuous improvement process directed by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) with regard to its regional household travel survey. The paper reports on how lessons learned from NYMTC's 1997–1998 household travel survey along with feedback from respondents were used to plan and design the 2010 household travel survey. New methods and tools that were implemented in a 2010 survey pretest are identified, and conclusions concerning the recommended survey design are provided.