Model-Based Approach to Synthesize Household Travel Characteristics across Neighborhood Types and Geographic Areas
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 134, Issue 12
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.
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Acknowledgments
This study is part of the transferability study funded by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The writers also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which have greatly improved the paper.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 134 • Issue 12 • December 2008
Pages: 493 - 503
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Jun 13, 2006
Accepted: Jun 6, 2008
Published online: Dec 1, 2008
Published in print: Dec 2008
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