With increasing costs for household travel surveys and declining response rates, a method has been developed to synthesize household travel survey data from a combination of Decennial Census and NPTS data sources. The paper describes the application of this procedure to two urban areas for which an actual household travel survey exists from about the same time period -Dallas-Fort Worth and Salt Lake City. The paper describes results obtained from applying the generic data as the basis of the simulation. Results are compared between the synthetic and real data to determine the closeness of the match between the data sets. This process holds out considerable promise for replacing the collection of larger samples of household travel data, particularly for small and medium sized urban areas, where the expenses of samples of 2,500 to 4,000 households are too great for the MPO to cover, but where data are needed for local model estimation. The paper concludes by indicating the potential cost savings of this process is estimated to cost less than $25,000 to produce a synthetic data set of 5,000 households. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, please see ITRD abstract no. E206301.
Abstract