Vehicle Occupancy Data Collection Methods

As congestion management strategies begin to emphasize more person movements than vehicle movements, vehicle occupancy data are becoming increasingly important. With this increasing need for occupancy data comes the need to examine and reexamine the ways in which these data have been, and will be, collected. This project reviews the existing methods of vehicle occupancy data collection; examines issues related to geographic, temporal, and vehicle coverage design of occupancy data collection; and develops guidelines for performing occupancy data collection as well as analyzing occupancy data. Appropriate sampling plans for site-specific, corridor, and regional studies are presented. Potential new methods for collecting occupancy data are discussed. A user-friendly software system that can estimate occupancy rates from multiple years of crash records on the Florida state roadway system was developed as part of this study. The system can estimate occupancy rates for select roadway segment, corridor, or regional level for specific time periods for different types of vehicles. The system also includes a stand-alone geographic information system (GIS) interface to facilitate the selection of geographic features and display of occupancy rate estimates. Also developed is a Pocket PC application that can facilitate field data collection based on the commonly used windshield method. A companion program for this Pocket PC application was also developed to compute the average vehicle occupancy rates and related statistics from the field data.

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