The purpose of this study was to determine whether analyses based on tours rather than trips could be used to characterise household travel patterns successfully for use in synthetic travel data simulation. This study used the 2001 US National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) Day Trip file to analyse household travel and to determine whether tours could be derived intelligently from the available data. The 2001 NHTS data is the most recent national travel survey dataset from the U.S. and is a very large data set (containing 642,292 trips). The size of the data set provides a unique challenge and opportunity to examine and refine trip-to-tour conversion procedures on a large scale. This paper outlines the operational and procedural steps involved in cleaning the data set and formulating strategies for categorising the trips into tours. Some basic statistical analyses of the tour data are presented, and a summary of important considerations when dealing with tour-based data are suggested. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E214666.
Abstract