The Minnesota Travel Behavior Inventory (TBI), conducted on behalf of the Metropolitan Council, Minnesota Department of Transporation and Wisconsin Department of Transportation sought to obtain a snapshot of travel behavior in the greater Twin Cities region. The TBI is a multi-year, multi-dimensional endeavor featuring a transit on-board survey, special generator studies, traffic and commerical counts and a household travel survey with a GPS subsample. Cambridge Systematics and a team of transportation professionals executed the inventory. The recent successfully completed household travel survey (HTS), conducted by Cambridge Systematics and Abt SRBI, will be the focus of this paper.

The HTS included over 12,000 households (and over 25,000 persons) from 19 Minnesota and Wisconsin counties. Households completed a detailed household roster and each member of the household six years of age or older participated in an activity-based diary of travel behavior for a 24 hour period on a predetermined weekday. Recruitment of households was done either by phone contact or by mailed invitation. At the completion of each household’s travel day, households were given the option to report travel information by one of three methods (phone, web, or mail). Two hundered and fifty households in the Twin Cities region were selected to participate in a GPS sub-sample. A three-tiered sample design strategy that targeted households by size, total number of vehicles, and geography was implemented. Moreover, completed households were distributed evenly over the year-long data collection period to capture seasonality.

This paper will provide an overview of study design, including sampling plan, data collection strategies, considerations for hard-to-reach market segments, and a review of incentive program effectiveness. The paper will draw comparisons between regional and completed household characterisitics—both demographic and geographic. In addition, we will also discuss the effect of seasonality on travel, look at study compliance and participation, and evaluate observed differences between GPS and diary reported travel behavior.

In addition, the paper will describe best practices and lesssons learned, strageties to overcome low responding market segments, and practices the industry must consider in large scale HTS data collection efforts.

Sixth Author: Cemal Ayvalik, Cambridge Systematics