Strategies for improved collection of national travel data

2011-03-16

(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON — Good travel data are essential to measure and monitor the performance of the U.S. transportation system and to help guide policy choices and investments in transportation infrastructure, says a new report from the National Research Council that calls for the creation of a national travel data program. Current data are inadequate to support decision making in the transportation sector.

"Each day our transportation network serves hundreds of millions of travelers and handles millions of tons of freight, yet we are not collecting the data necessary to analyze demands on the system," said Joseph L. Schofer, chair of the committee that wrote the report and associate dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. "To help us better manage and improve our transportation system, we need federally funded core travel data well-integrated with data collected from states, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), transit agencies, and private-sector data providers."

The committee recommended that the U.S. Department of Transportation take the lead in creating the "National Travel Data Program" despite the department's past failures to develop an effective travel data program. DOT's Research and Innovative Technology Administration and Bureau of Transportation Statistics should carry out the design and management of the program and work cooperatively with other government agencies, private-sector data providers, and professional and nonprofit associations to organize and implement the program. The committee also called for a program advisory council that broadly represents travel data constituencies to provide strategic advice directly to the secretary of transportation on the design and conduct of the program and on emerging data needs.

At present, travel data collection activities are scattered throughout DOT and other federal agencies. The states, MPOs, and the private sector also collect travel data, primarily for their own uses. The most comprehensive travel data are gathered by the federal government using periodic surveys. Coverage of these surveys is incomplete, sample sizes frequently are insufficient to support meaningful analyses, and the results often are not timely. Moreover, funding for these surveys is subject to shifting political priorities, which can place them at risk for cancellation.

The report recommends that DOT and its data partners aggressively invest in the design, testing, and deployment of new methods and technologies for data collection as well as advance the current travel data collection system by employing more consistent data definitions, stronger quality controls, better integration of data sets, and more strategic use of privately collected data. In addition, development of more common formats for state and regional travel data would enable greater integration and aggregation of these data across jurisdictions for analysis and decision making.

The next generation of travel data collection activities should be developed and implemented under the National Travel Data Program, the report said. On the passenger side, this would include a more robust National Household Travel Survey, a revived intercity passenger travel survey for surface transportation modes, and a new continuous national panel survey to track traveler behavior and trends over time.

Collection of freight travel data requires a major reorientation, the report notes. It should include the Commodity Flow Survey as well as a new industry-based, logistics-oriented supply chain survey to support analysis of the economic impacts of freight logistics and related public infrastructure investment requirements. Local operations surveys are also needed to understand local freight flows, particularly within metropolitan areas.

Given national interest in energy efficiency and environmental impacts of both passenger and commercial vehicles, the committee recommended reviving a vehicle inventory and use survey.

To ensure the collection, integration, and dissemination of these core travel data, the recommended National Travel Data Program will require sustained federal funding estimated by the committee to be between 15 million and 20 million dollars annually. Current annual federal spending on core travel data is about 6 million dollars. Schofer noted, "The next reauthorization of surface transportation legislation offers the opportunity to secure the funding. With billions of investment dollars at stake, the proposed modest increment in funding of 9 million to 14 million dollars to ensure better outcomes is both necessary and prudent."

###

The study, which was conducted by the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board and Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Research and Innovative Technology Administration and Federal Highway Administration; the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program; and the Transportation Research Board. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter. The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. For more information, visit http://national-academies.org. A committee roster follows.

Contacts:

Maureen O'Leary, Director of Public Information

Shaquanna Shields, Media Relations Assistant

Office of News and Public Information

202-334-2138; e-mail news@nas.edu

Pre-publication copies of How We Travel: A Sustainable National Program For Travel Data are available from the Transportation Research Board's bookstore, tel. 202-334-3213, and National Academies Press, tel. 202-334-3313. Reporters may obtain a copy from the Office of News and Public Information (contacts listed above).

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
Transportation Research Board
and
Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education
Committee on Strategies for Improved Passenger and Freight Travel Data

Joseph L. Schofer (chair)
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and
Associate Dean
Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied
Science, and
Director
Infrastructure Technology Institute
Northwestern University
Evanston, Ill.

Joseph G.B. Bryan
Vice President
Halcrow
Cambridge, Mass.

Anne P. Canby
President
Surface Transportation Policy Partnership
Washington, D.C.

Anand Desai
Professor and Chair of Doctoral Studies
John Glenn School of Public Affairs
Ohio State University
Columbus

Mortimer L. Downey III
Senior Adviser
Parsons Brinckerhoff
Washington, D.C.

Lance R. Grenzeback
Senior Vice President
Cambridge Systematics Inc.
Cambridge, Mass.

Hermann Habermann
Independent Consultant
Arlington, Va.

Timothy A. Henkel
Assistant Commissioner
Modal Planning and Program Management Division
Minnesota Department of Transportation
St. Paul

Charles E. Howard Jr.
Transportation Planning Director
Puget Sound Regional Council
Seattle

James M. Lepkowski
Professor
Institute for Social Research, and
Professor
Department of Biostatistics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor

Daniel C. Murray
Vice President of Research
American Transportation Research Institute
St. Paul, Minn.

Alan E. Pisarski
Independent Consultant
Falls Church, Va.

Steven E. Polzin
Director of Mobility Policy Research
Center for Urban Transportation Research
University of South Florida
Tampa

Johanna P. Zmud
Senior Policy Researcher
RAND Corp.
Arlington, Va.

STAFF
Nancy P. Humphrey
Study Director, TRB

Stephen Godwin
Director, Studies and Special
Programs, TRB

Constance F. Citro
Center Director, CNSTAT

Thomas J. Plewes
Senior Program Officer, CNSTAT

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

'Openness prevails' -- have Obama's promises fallen short?

2011-03-16

London, UK (March 15th, 2011) – WikiLeak's disclosures highlight longstanding problems of the overclassification of information and failure of transparency laws, says David L Sobel. When Barack Obama took office as president in January 2009, he identified transparency as one of the highest priorities on his agenda for change. Writing in the current issue of Index on Censorship, David L Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US, suggests that the president's early promises remain unfulfilled. He argues that, with the US government's failure ...

Wright Law Offices: Bankruptcy in Kingman, Arizona

2011-03-16

Mohave County and its major areas of Kingman, Bullhead City, and Lake Havasu City are especially vulnerable to the poor economic times facing our country. Recently the Kingman Daily Miner reported that the Kingman and Lake Havasu areas had an unemployment rate of 10.2%, this is higher than the Arizona average of 9.4%. The biggest problem with this statistic is that it does not take in to account all the people that have either stopped looking for work or are underemployed. There is currently an epidemic of of unemployment and underemployment in Kingman, Arizona, as well ...

Collectibles can trigger obsessive-compulsive disorder in vulnerable people

2011-03-16

The massive marketing campaigns launched by publishing houses at the start of the academic year can cause people bound to suffer obsessive-compulsive disorder to develop this pathology before. The fact is that collecting articles without control is a symptom of this serious psychological disorder –one of which most known variants is Diogenes syndrom– and of shopping addiction. These are two mental disorders affecting approximately 12% of the population. Porcelain dolls, precious stones, world thimbles, watches, fans, dinosaurs, language courses, and tanks and ships in ...

The new adulthood: Extended parental support as a safety net

2011-03-16

Minneapolis, MN —March 15, 2011—A new study from the Journal of Marriage and Family shows that contrary to popular anxieties about slacker young adults who refuse to grow up, or indulgent parents who stifle their adult children's development by continuing to support them, there is evidence that parental assistance in early adulthood promotes progress toward autonomy and self-reliance. Study author Teresa Swartz, "The fact that young people depend so heavily upon their parents well beyond the age when most people from earlier generations had already started families and ...

New insights into cancer treatment

2011-03-16

Leuven - Jean-Christophe Marine (VIB, K.U.Leuven) strongly argues against the use of Cop1-inhibitory drugs. The protein Cop1 has –for a long time - been seen as an attractive drug target for cancer. But Jean-Christophe Marine found out that Cop1 acts as a tumor suppressor, and thus inhibits tumor formation. His new data will have direct implications for the development of cancer drug targets. Tumorigenesis: loss of control Tumors form when control over the cell division is lost; a process that could be compared to losing control over the speed of your car. Two main players ...

Surgical Mistakes More Common Than Patients Believe

2011-03-16

It is every patient's worst nightmare: to wake up in the recovery room after surgery to learn that something went wrong. In some cases, the bad outcome is simply a matter of chance: one of the known risks of the surgery happened to occur. But in other cases, the bad outcome is the direct result of the negligence of the physician performing the surgery and was entirely avoidable. Surgical mistakes happen much more often than most Americans realize. Sometimes these mistakes are minor and may never cause any harm to the patients, but this is not always the case. According ...

Apnea may be cause for awakening and voiding for those with enlarged prostates report Ben-Gurion U.

2011-03-16

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, March 15, 2011– Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have shown that a significant number of patients with benign prostate enlargement (BPE) may have Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), which may be the reason for their night awakenings and urination. This study compared men between the ages of 55 and 75 who were randomly sampled from primary care clinics, diagnosed with BPE and reported nocturia at least once nightly. The comparison control group had no BPE and one or no nocturia episodes per night. According to the new study published ...

All wrapped up: K-State researcher's graphene cloak protects bacteria, leading to better images

2011-03-16

MANHATTAN, KAN. -- It's a cloak that surpasses all others: a microscopic carbon cloak made of graphene that could change the way bacteria and other cells are imaged. Vikas Berry, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Kansas State University, and his research team are wrapping bacteria with graphene to address current challenges with imaging bacteria under electron microscopes. Berry's method creates a carbon cloak that protects the bacteria, allowing them to be imaged at their natural size and increasing the image's resolution. Graphene is a form of carbon ...

EARTH: Still in a haze: Black carbon

2011-03-16

Alexandria, VA - Black carbon - fine particles of soot in the atmosphere produced from the burning of fossil fuels or biomass - a major contributor to the thick hazes of pollution hovering over cities around the world, has been known to be a health hazard for decades. But over the last decade, scientists have been examining in increasing detail the various ways in which these particles contribute to another hazard: heating up the planet. Black carbon's impact on climate is not cut-and-dried, however, as EARTH explores in "Still in a Haze: What We Don't Know About Black ...

Brain injuries rise sharply in minor hockey after bodychecking rules relaxed: Study

2011-03-16

TORONTO, On — March 15, 2011 — Minor league hockey players in the Atom division are more than 10 times likely to suffer a brain injury since bodychecking was first allowed among the 9 and 10-year-olds, says a study led by St. Michael's Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano. The findings, published online in the journal Open Medicine, add to the growing evidence that bodychecking holds greater risk than benefit for youth and support widespread calls to ban the practice. According to the researchers, led by Cusimano, director of the Injury Prevention Research Centre ...

Strategies for improved collection of national travel data

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: