PANEL SURVEY INCORPORATING CUSTOMER ATTITUDINAL AND TRAVEL DATA: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES AND APPLICATIONS TO TRANSIT POLICY AND PLANNING

A wide variety of transit service, fare and policy issues require information on consumer travel behavior, customer opinions or both. To meet these needs, New York City Transit initiated its Transportation study, involving a cross-section of 1,500 New York City residents. The Panel Study combines a telephone survey concerning customer attitudes on bus and subway service with collection of detailed travel data using a self-administered two-day trip diary. As the Panel Study nears completion of its fourth year, a rich base of experience has been compiled which will be of broad interest. This paper reports on a range of key methodological aspects of the study, including response and retention rates; use of incentives; effect of increasing the frequency of respondent participation; validation of travel data with actual ridership levels; and effects on attitudes and travel behavior of the aging of respondents through successive waves of interviewing. The paper also demonstrates the effective uses of the results for transit agency planning and monitoring. These include analyses of travel behavior, evaluation of the impacts of major changes in fare policy, tracking of customer opinions, and assessments of transit's competitive position. Major conclusions are that the Panel approach is highly valuable for tracking customer opinion, particularly in showing the impact of policy changes, obtaining times results on issues as they approach a decision, and providing a richly detailed database of trip information. More difficult has been tracking changes in transit's share of overall travel and relating attitudinal ratings with mode choice.