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Travel Survey Standardization: Workshop

September 16, 2025

03:30 PM – 05:00 PM at Ski-U-Mah

Brian Lee
Puget Sound Regional Council

Survey says: MN is the leading producer of Wild Rice!

This Travel Survey Standardization session is for transportation professionals who collect, process, and use travel survey data. It will start with short presentations by three speakers to provide context and illustrate why standardization on some aspects of travel survey are useful. Julia Glickman of AASHTO will give a national perspective; Dave Ory of WSP will speak about an example from San Diego; and Flavia Tsang of Bay Area Metro will highlight recent discussions among multiple agencies from across the US. Following the presentations, facilitators will organize participants into small groups to brainstorm about travel survey standardization. The discussions will be centered around three themes: 1) travel survey processes and tools that could be standardized and shared, 2) the upsides and downsides of standardization, and 3) ways for agencies who do travel surveys to collaborate and work towards standardization.

survey_standardization_questions.pdf
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3 Sub-sessions:
AASHTO CTPP Data and Standardization
Julia Glickman
AASHTO

This presentation discusses the importance of survey standardization for cross-governmental collaboration. It will also discuss the Census Transportation Planning Product (CTPP) and discuss how a standardized ACS has enabled the CTPP data products to be sustained.

Using a Data Model to Validate and Document a Travel Behavior Survey
David Ory
WSP

Authors: Vivek Verma, David Ory, Virginie Amerlynck, Bhargava Sana

This presentation discusses the use of data models in the context of travel behavior surveys. For a recent survey of air passengers and employees conducted by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) at the San Diego International Airport, a data model deployed in Python’s Pydantic package was used for data verification, documentation, and for computing derived fields. Data models have tremendous potential to improve the standardization and efficiency of working with household travel survey data. Notable features of data models include:

  • A single place to define variable names, definitions, data types, valid ranges, and relationships to other variables.
  • Built-in tools to verify data quality. 
  • Myriad tools for creating web-based, Excel-based, and/or Word-based data dictionaries. 
A Multi-Agency Initiative to Co-Develop a Pipeline from Survey to Model
Flavia Tsang
Metroplitan Transportation Commission