Sound Data Stories

Public Release 1 of data from the 2014 Puget Sound Regional Travel Study is now available for download. This large-scale household travel and activity survey took place in spring 2014. Data collection started in April and ended in mid-June. Nearly 6,000 households throughout King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish counties participated. The study plan also includes a survey of university students and staff, completed in fall 2014. A booster survey of the region will take place in spring 2015.

Notes on Public Release 1

This dataset contains trip records for all participating households and has been cleaned to remove most errors. It includes a preliminary set of household weights (i.e. expansion factors) to represent regional travel and to account for oversampling and sampling biases. Some elements missing from this dataset will be available in later releases.

Transit trips have not been linked. This means that a person who uses transit to reach her or his final destination could potential have several trips listed representing a single travel event. For example, suppose a person walked to transit, took a ferry, took a bus, and then walked from transit. This is usually represented as a single trip in modeling. However, in public release 1 the event could be listed as four separate trips.

Some re-weighting of travel may be required in the final release of the data. Staff have not yet verified that the number of transit trips estimated by the survey is consistent with transit boarding data. In this dataset, a high walking mode share is observed as compared to the 2006 household survey. We currently believe this is because of the survey design. The survey prompted people to recall every short trip they took, and this resulted in more trips being recorded than in 2006. We do not believe this represents a behavioral change, but rather an improvement in survey reporting.

Coming soon: Public Release 2

Later this winter, a follow-on release will include the following additional data:

• Linked transit trips. PR1 reports each leg of a multi-vehicle transit trip individually. In other words, if you transferred to get to your destination, each transit trip is listed separately.
• Multi-stop “tours” have not yet been generated. Each trip on a multi-stop tour is listed separately. PR2 will link trips together that were part of a multi-stop tour.
• Additional data cleaning, as necessary.

This has been an enormous effort and we want to particularly thank all participating households, as well as the cities of Bellevue and Seattle for their financial contributions to this major undertaking!

Links:

• Dataset: Download Public Release 1 Here
• Survey website: 2014 Puget Sound Regional Travel Study