The new survey will give researchers a better understanding of how commuters get around the state today.
When UConn engineering professor Karthik Konduri was reviewing the first set of results from a statewide transportation study he’s working on, he wasn’t surprised when the mobile taxi service Uber started showing up in survey responses.
Uber’s a popular service now, but a decade ago, mobile ride sharing hadn’t started to boom yet, and certainly wasn’t a reality the last time a statewide household transportation survey took place -- in 1978.
This new survey -- sponsored by the state Department of Transportation in partnership with the Connecticut Transportation Institute at UConn -- will give researchers a better understanding of how commuters get around the state today. The results will help update the state’s travel model, a database of information that transportation planners pull from. The updated model will give planners regional estimates of the number of vehicle miles traveled and public transit ridership.
“It helps us plan corridor studies,” said DOT project manager Judy Raymond. “If we’re doing a new plan with new scenarios as to: what do you want to do to improve this corridor? Would adding a new highway lane help? Would increasing transit help?”
Since the last survey almost 40 years ago, the state’s travel model has been kept up-to-date by data from census officials and transit companies, but officials say this new survey data will give planners a fresh look at travel behavior in the state and will be important in shaping decision-making around future transit projects in Connecticut.
“In 1978, we didn’t have flextime or telecommuting in the state, so that’s a big change,” Raymond said. “Van and car pooling was just starting out in the 70s. Bicycle transportation is new and becoming a major component.”
Researchers aim to collect results from 7,500 households across the state. Participants will be assigned a specific day of the week to describe their travel behavior in detail. The survey, which started in March, will continue until the beginning of June to accommodate seasonal changes in transportation methods.
Konduri said that volunteers aren’t discouraged from participating -- people who didn’t receive an invitation can sign up by contacting the research team -- but the large majority of the surveying will be done by mail so the researchers can focus on specific demographics.
“Two of the sub-population groups that are of interest to us are transit users and zero-vehicle houses,” Konduri said. “These could be correlated to other factors such as minority groups, or non-motorists, or low-income populations.”
Konduri said one-third of the surveying will target regions that have large percentages of public transit users. And the survey encourages all participants, regardless of location, to log trips they make without vehicles, he said.
The data will take four to five months to be processed, and then a new state travel model will start to be developed in the fall, Konduri said. The research team estimates the data will be incorporated into the state’s transportation planning sometime in 2017.
