Application of an Internet-Based Travel Survey in a Medium-Sized Community

The increasing development in technological capabilities and resources is pushing the transportation industry to implement new and better technologies to improve techniques for collecting travel behavior data for transportation planning applications. Travel surveys are the most common procedure used for this task and the development of more efficient ways to gather data is a major concern for transportation agencies. Improvement of data collection methods would produce great benefits for policy makers and taxpayers because of potential savings in time, cost and resources. The ever-increasing availability of the Internet creates an opportunity for a potentially more efficient, less costly means of collecting travel behavior data. An efficient Internet-based travel survey has the potential of being a very effective means of collecting data for inclusion into transportation planning models (e.g., trip generation, distribution). This project examines the usefulness of an Internet survey through a pilot study in Huntsville, AL. The study specifically addresses the data (types, range, etc.) obtained from the Internet travel survey and efficacy of applying the collected data for transportation planning applications.