81237 | 2025 On-Board & Household Travel Surveys

This program will support the economic vitality of the region; improve accessibility and equity; enhance connectivity between modes; promote the efficient management and operation of the transportation system; and support the development and use of transportation, air quality, economic development, and land use models by collecting data on the systems users and their travel-related behavior.
On-Board and Household Travel Surveys are necessary both to understand the travel behavior of a regions residents and workers, and also to build and validate travel models that reflect that behavior. They provide up-to-date trip and tour rates by purpose and household or person type; insights into the interactions between transportation and land use; origin, destination, and trip length frequency data; detailed statistics on the factors that affect mode choice and transit ridership; and information on how auto operating costs, tolls, fares, and parking charges impact the transportation system. As the COVID pandemic recedes, several structural changes that impact trip making behavior and the transportation system are likely to endure, including a greater propensity to work-from-home, a greater reliance on Ecommerce, and less of a traditional downtown/CBD focus for work trips. Long-term impacts to transit ridership and trip rates by purpose and time-of-day are less well understood.
Planning for new federal, state, and local transportation policies and programs would also benefit from new survey data. These include the federal Carbon Reduction Program and Justice40 Initiative, expanded efforts to improve equity through transportation projects, and Vision Zero programs to improve safety. All of these are likely to lead to changes in the types and locations of transportation programs and projects that are pursued over the next several decades. Accurate, up-to-date data on the characteristics of the users of the system and how they use the system will be essential to forecast the impacts of these projects, and to plan for
their implementation.
There are several new and emerging technologies that may offer significant benefits over traditional pen and paper surveys in terms of easier facilitation and implementation of the data collection process, higher survey response rates, and more accurate survey results. These include the use of smartphone applications and tracking devices by survey respondents, purchasing cell phone location data from Location Based Service (LBS) vendors, purchasing add-on surveys to the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) program, and mining SEPTA Key data. It is anticipated that the most effective and efficient data collection program will combine elements of these programs with traditional survey diaries and on-board interviews.
In FY2024, data collection plans for both a comprehensive On-Board Survey and a Household Travel Survey were developed. This project will implement those plans. Survey data will be collected, tabulated, cleaned, processed and analyzed over the course of three fiscal years. DVRPC will draft and release RFPs for data collection for both surveys; evaluate and rank the proposals, and hire consultants to perform data collection. Data collection will begin in FY2025 - pilot surveys targeting small segments of the population will be used to test the survey questions and methodology, and determine if any adjustments or refinements need to be made before official launch. Once the On-Board and Household Travel surveys are officially underway, DVRPC will monitor and supervise data collection and perform other administrative tasks as needed. Data collection will continue throughout FY2026 and FY2027. The project will culminate in FY2027 with consultant delivery of cleaned and processed databases for both the On-Board and Household Travel surveys. Following delivery of the databases, the final tasks will be divided between DVRPC and the consultants in an as yet to be determined way, and will include geocoding survey responses, survey expansion, summarizing the results, and writing the technical reports documenting the survey methodologies and results.
This project will require the purchase of goods and/or services including any/all of the following: Hiring consultants, hiring temp agency workers, purchasing NHTS add-on data, purchasing cell phone location data from LBS vendors.
Tasks:
1. Create steering committee to evaluate and rank proposals.
2. Draft RFP for On-Board Survey data collection.
3. Review, evaluate, and rank consultant proposals for On-Board Survey data collection.
4. Hire consultant team for On-Board Survey data collection.
5. Draft RFP for Household Travel Survey data collection.
6. Review, evaluate, and rank consultant proposals for Household Travel Survey data collection.
7. Hire consultant team for Household Travel Survey data collection.
8. Monitor and supervise data collection for both the On-Board and Household Travel surveys
9. Review consultants' work products.
10. Expand On-Board Survey to represent regional universe of transit riders.
11. Write technical report documenting On-Board survey methodology and results.
12. Expand Household Travel Survey to represent regional universe of households.
13. Write technical report documenting household travel survey methodology and results.

No milestones are available for this project.