Uses of National Household Travel Survey Data in - NHTS Home ...

Survey, Data Synthesis, and Other Applications
Model-Based Approach to Synthesize Household Travel Characteristics across Neighborhood
Types and Geographic Areas
Authors:
Lin, Jie; Long, Liang
Journal of Transportation Engineering Issue: 12
12/1/2008
Abstract:
Household travel survey data are crucial in regional travel demand analysis. However, good quality data
are not always available owing to financial constraints, privacy concerns, poorly designed sampling
schemes, and/or low response rates. Thus, various data synthesis techniques have been proposed in the
past. In this paper, we identify the limitations of the existing data updating/synthesis methods and propose
a two-level random coefficient model to synthesis household travel characteristics across geographic
areas. Then the two-level structure was applied to the sampled households in the 2001 National
Household Travel Survey across (consolidated) metropolitan statistical areas of various population sizes.
One particular travel characteristic, journey to work vehicle trip rate, is investigated. The study findings
confirm the effect of neighborhood (defined at the census tract level) attributes (e.g., intersection density,
average auto mobile work trip travel time) on household number of journey to work vehicle trips. This
effect is significant on the urban households of study, whereas the suburban counterparts across the
country do not seem to be affected by their living environments after controlling for neighborhood type.
In general, the two-level structure is shown statistically superior to the one level.
Subject areas and Index Terms
Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning
Coefficients; Data processing; Data quality; Geography; Mathematical models; Neighborhoods; Travel
patterns; Travel surveys; Work trips
Availability: Find a library where document is available Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/8674831
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