On behalf of the City of Flagstaff and Coconino County, the Flagstaff Metropolitan Planning Organization (FMPO) will conduct a Trip Diary Survey with Flagstaff area households the week of October 10, 2011. Residences that receive a Trip Diary Survey in the mail are encouraged to respond.
Survey results will be used to assess existing travel patterns and make plans to improve residents’ travel experience in the Flagstaff region. This is the FMPO’s second trip diary survey, and the 2011 results will be compared with those from the first survey in 2006 to assess trends over time. The FMPO plans to repeat the survey approximately every five years to assess changes in travel trends, help identify transportation solutions, and monitor or gauge successes. “The Trip Diary Survey provides valuable information about the Flagstaff region’s travel patterns. The survey is consistent with the FMPO’s data-driven approach to identifying and addressing our community’s transportation priorities,” says David Wessel, the FMPO’s manager.
The FMPO is the Flagstaff region’s transportation planning partnership comprised of the City of Flagstaff, Coconino County, and the Arizona Department of Transportation that coordinates transportation planning and funding in the Flagstaff area.
A total of 3,000 randomly-selected households in the Flagstaff area, including students at Northern Arizona University, will be asked to provide information on their travel and commuting patterns for the trip survey. Households will be invited to keep a simple trip log for a single day during the week. Examples of “trips” include walking to school, taking the bus, driving to work or biking for recreation. Household participants will be randomly chosen, and will be completely confidential.
The survey will be conducted by National Research Center, Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, a survey research team that focuses on the information needs of the public sector with an emphasis in transportation. TheTrip Diary Survey is similar in concept to the Nielson diaries for logging television viewing but it has a different purpose in efficiently providing complex and accurate travel data to facilitate informed decision-making. The trip diary process is successfully used in many cities, including Boulder, Colorado and Eugene, Oregon, to periodically evaluate trends in travel patterns. In particular, the trip diary survey approach is the most accurate way to compare travel patterns among modes, such as driving, transit, walking, and bicycling.
For more information on the Trip Diary Survey, please contact Martin Ince, multi-modal planner for the FMPO, at (928) 213-2685
