How do you travel? Your regional planning commission wants to know

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is collecting granular information about daily travel: Where did people go? Why? Did they drive, take transit, walk, bike, or use an electric mobility device?

Planners working on the project aren’t nosy or trying to surveil anybody.

They need real-time data to update DVRPC’s travel demand model for the nine-county Philadelphia area that will guide funding decisions about infrastructure projects and transportation plans for the next decade.

“Compared to any other 10-year period that I can recall, there has just been so much transformation in how people travel,” said Mike Boyer, the agency’s director of regional planning.

Information from a new household travel survey will show a clear picture of exactly how it changed and provide clues about where regional transportation might be headed. The last household survey was conducted in 2012 and 2013 and a final version was published in 2015.

Typically, DVRPC conducts a travel survey every decade, but officials waited 13 years this time to allow transportation patterns to settle into a “new normal” after the massive disruptions of the pandemic.

Beginning in January, DVRPC has been recruiting participants by mailing postcard invitations to randomly selected households in South Jersey and Southeastern Pennsylvania. It has also used some social media posts.

People cannot reach out to nominate themselves.

Random invitations help ensure that respondents reflect the population of the region. Participants need to represent each of DVRPC’s nine counties, as well as a mix of households by income, size, number of workers, and other demographics.

It is expected to take the rest of the year to get the 9,000 to 10,000 completed household surveys required for a good picture of the region’s habits, said Matt Gates, associate director of travel trends and forecasts for DVRPC.

Based on typical response rates, it may take as many as 300,000 postcards to recruit enough participants, he said.

Recruitment paused for the summer and started up again after Labor Day.

DVRPC serves Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Mercer Counties in New Jersey as well as Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties in Pennsylvania.

Survey data will be held confidential and anonymized, used in the research but not attached to any specific household or phone number, Boyer said.

“Data won’t be sold or used by any third party,” he said. “We want to be forthright about that.”

Most will report household trips for one 24-hour period, starting around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., using a smartphone app that runs in the background, tracking each trip via GPS.

When it detects what might be a trip, it prompts the participant to confirm it and provide details such as the trip’s purpose and what type of transportation is used.

“If you leave your house in the morning and go to work, and then you leave work and go somewhere for lunch, and then you go back to the office, and then, on the way home, you stop at the dry cleaner — all of those pieces of your daily travel are joined together,” said Gates, the chief travel modeler.

That would be counted as a “tour,” broken into separate trips, each attached to a specific activity.

The survey also asks for basic household information — size, ages, jobs, school attendance, income, and vehicles. E-bikes, e-scooters, personal mobility devices for people with disabilities, traditional pedal-powered bicycles, and walking will be counted as separate modes of travel.

In the 2012-13 survey, walking and biking were separate options, but the travel model combined them in one category called “nonmotorized.” A catchall “other” category covered everything else.

Participants who do not want to use the app can keep a paper travel diary and then either enter their trip information on a website or reach a call center, where a person will walk them through the questions and record the data.

After it is fed into the travel model, DVRPC will use it to help draft a Transportation Improvement Program (TIP). That is the federally mandated priority list for allocating federal and state funding of transportation, transit, and highway projects across the region.

But that’s not all.

Planners use it to decide on traffic safety projects, to chart where new recreational trails should go, and to test scenarios in response to events.

Combining the data with information about the transportation network can provide insight into how people make decisions about, say, using a SEPTA train vs. driving between two points, Gates said. “Is it time? Is it cost? The number of vehicles available in a household?”

A good travel demand model with those insights can help answer “what if” questions such as what effect a new train line or highway would have, or rising gas prices, transit fare increases, and service cuts, Gates said.

It can help planners think about how the transportation network could accommodate a spurt of growth in Quakertown, Bucks County, for example, or Woolwich Township, Gloucester County.

Last year DVRPC used existing data to project added motor vehicle traffic amid SEPTA service cuts, which began but were quickly rolled back.

» READ MORE: SEPTA cuts equal longer commutes