Recommended Practices for Transit Onboard Surveys

Transportation planners have not adopted standards for designing or conducting origin and destination (OD) transit on-board surveys. Actual practices differ greatly, and the quality and accuracy of the data collected are also varied. In general, better data are needed to contribute to successful transit demand modeling. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges for designing and executing a successful transit on-board survey to collect OD information and to describe best practices to collect useful data. The paper addresses the structure of the survey sample selection, content and design for the survey questionnaire, selection of survey workers, survey execution, and data verification.