DOI: 10.3886/icpsr34678.v1
title: Household Travel Survey: Baltimore Region, 2001
title: Version 1

description: Approximately every 5 years, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) conducts a national household survey that is used to measure demographic and household travel characteristics used to evaluate national policies and assist researchers in understanding emerging travel trends. The USDOT allows states, local jurisdictions and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) to purchase additional local samples. The Baltimore Regional Transportation Board (BRTB), the designated MPO for the Baltimore metropolitan area, agreed to participate in the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) as an add-on. The NHTS would also allow the household travel within the Baltimore region to be compared to similar urban areas across the country, since all survey data and add-ons are collected in a similar fashion. The household survey was mainly focused on weekday travel, collecting a one day travel itinerary from 3,131 Baltimore region households. A smaller survey of 325 households was also sampled to obtain weekend travel behavior. Traditionally, travel activity has been focused on weekday travel associated with commuting as a primary concern. Recently, non-work related travel has rivaled commuting with some locations in the Baltimore region having the greatest one hour peak volume on weekends. A smaller weekend sample was selected to start the process of understanding the travel choices being made and to establish a baseline to measure change. Demographic variables include the respondent's age, sex, employment status, occupation, education level, household income, place of birth, relationship to the reference person, whether the respondent is a licensed driver, and whether respondents have a medical condition.
description: The Baltimore Regional Transportation Board felt the survey was a unique opportunity to collect household travel observations that could assist in developing travel models used in policy analysis and development of long range transportation plans. The travel survey also coincided with the 2000 decennial Census, another large database used by local planners. The NHTS would also allow the household travel within the Baltimore region to be compared to similar urban areas across the country, since all survey data and add-ons are collected in a similar fashion. These types of comparisons are useful in evaluating the transferability of successful transportation policies in other communities.
description: The data contain several weight variables that may be used in analyzing the data. However, the weighting method is unknown. For additional information, please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation section of the ICPSR codebook.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: Metropolitan Travel Behavior Survey Series
description: telephone interview 
 For additional information, please refer to the Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive Web site.
description: Baltimore MSA households. Smallest Geographic Unit: traffic analysis zone
description: Using the Travel Survey Manual, Travel Model Improvement Program, (July 1996), BMC staff estimated regionwide sample sizes for various trip categories and confidence levels using the mean, standard deviation and coefficient of variation (standard deviation/mean) calculated from the 1993 Household Travel Survey. For additional sampling information, please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation section of the ICPSR codebook.