DOI: 10.3886/icpsr35294.v1
title: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut Regional Travel - Household Interview Survey (RT-HIS), 1997-1998
title: Version 1

description: The New York, New Jersey, Connecticut Regional Travel - Household Interview Survey (RT-HIS), 1997-1998, was sponsored by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) and the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA). The survey was conducted from February 1997 through May 1998, and relied on the willingness of area residents to complete diary records of their daily travel over a designated 24-hour period. Random recruitment of households was conducted by a telephone recruitment interview in which respondents were informed of the survey, its purpose, and the obligation of respondents to complete travel diaries. Data on households and household members were also collected during the recruitment interview. Participating households were assigned a specific travel day, which typically occurred 10 days after recruitment; each household member was asked to record travel information in a travel diary for the specified 24-hour period. Immediately after the assigned date, households were contacted by telephone to retrieve the diary information. In total, 14,441 households were recruited to participate in the study. Of these, 11,264 households completed travel diaries. Travel information was retrieved from all household members regardless of age, and has been compiled into five public-use data files: The Household file includes demographic information pertaining to the household, such as county of residence, household size, dwelling type, home ownership status, tenure, dominant language, telephone ownership, ethnicity, and income;; The Person file contains demographic information pertaining to individual household members, including age, gender, relationship, employment status, student status, disability status, and licensed driver status;; The Vehicle file features information about all household vehicles, including the number of vehicles, vehicle year, vehicle type, and whether each vehicle is owned or leased;; The Trip file contains all travel day data, including information on places visited, arrival and departure times, activities at each destination, travel mode, parking costs, and detailed transit information;; The Location file includes information about each location visited by household members, such as location type, census tracts, and geocoding status data.; Additionally, data producers developed Household, Person, and Trip analysis data files; these files comprise parts 6 through 8, and contain the RT-HIS weight variables.
description: The purpose of the RT-HIS was to provide primary data for use in the construction of a transportation planning model for the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut metropolitan region.
description: The data are not weighted. However, datasets 6, 7, and 8 contain weight variables WHT_F (Final RTHIS Weight - Normalized) and EXP_F (Final RTHIS Weight - Expansion) which must be applied for analysis. For additional information on weighting, please see the Original P.I. Documentation section of the ICPSR User Guide.
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: Response Rates: The recruitment rate for the RT-HIS was 33.6 percent. That is, about one-third of the eligible households contacted agreed to provide demographic and person data in the recruitment interview. Of the recruited households, 11,264 recorded travel data for the assigned travel day, yielding a retrieval rate of 78.2 percent. The combined response rate (recruitment rate * retrieval rate) was 26 percent.
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Household Public Use Data 
 DS2: Person Public Use Data 
 DS3: Vehicle Public Use Data 
 DS4: Trip Public Use Data 
 DS5: Location Public Use Data 
 DS6: Household Analysis Data 
 DS7: Person Analysis Data 
 DS8: Trip Analysis Data
description: Metropolitan Travel Behavior Survey Series
description: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) 
 The Original P.I. Documentation contained within the ICPSR User Guide references the related collection 1995 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS), which is available for download as ICPSR 3595. 
Supplemental materials provided by the data producer are included in a zipped file package.
 For additional information on the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut Regional Travel - Household Interview Survey (RT-HIS), please visit the Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive Web site and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council Web site.
description: All households within the 28-county metropolitan region of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (New York: Bronx, Dutchess, Kings, Nassau, New York, Orange, Putnam, Queens, Richmond, Rockland, Suffolk, and Westchester counties; New Jersey: Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union, and Warren counties; Connecticut: Fairfield and New Haven counties). Smallest Geographic Unit: census tract
description: All households within the 28 counties comprising the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut metropolitan area were eligible for inclusion in the study through a random sampling process. For additional information on sampling, please see the Methods and Implementation section of the ICPSR User Guide.