The U.S. Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive is a project to store, preserve, and make publicly available, via the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

travel survey A travel survey (or travel diary or travel behavior inventory) is a survey of individual travel behavior. Most surveys collect information about an individual (socio-economic, demographic, etc.), their household (size, structure, relationships), a ...

s conducted by

metropolitan area A metropolitan area or metro is a region that consists of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories sharing industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructures and housing. A metro area usually com ...

s, states and localities. As of 2007, the archive held 58 surveys comprising 2,718,329 trip records, 516,108 person records, 219,097 household records, 173,354 vehicle records, and 528,847 location records. Similar to this U.S. archive, an international archive of travel survey date has been suggested so that this service is expanded into more countries. The motivation behind the archive is to forestall the loss of electronic files and documentation of surveys, which has befallen previous surveys. Archived from th
original
on May 1, 2009. "Properly archiving the travel surveys at a central location (with remote backups) safeguards the data against loss to calamities such as fires, earthquakes, floods, and terrorist attacks that have befallen earlier surveys." These surveys are both costly to conduct, and irreplaceable as it is impossible to reconstruct past records of human

travel behavior Travel behavior is the study of what people do over geography, and how people use transport. Questions studied The questions studied in travel behavior are broad, and are probed through activity and time-use research studies, and surveys of trave ...

. The archive was established with funding from the

United States Department of Transportation The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT or DOT) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It is headed by the secretary of transportation, who reports directly to the President of the United States and ...

.{{cite web, title=Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive , url=http://tmip.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/clearinghouse/343 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090502215641/http://tmip.fhwa.dot.gov/resources/clearinghouse/343 , publisher=

, location=Washington, DC , archive-date=May 2, 2009 , access-date=May 1, 2009 , quote=The United States Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics has funded a project at the University of Minnesota to develop a Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive to store, preserve, and make publicly available, via the internet, travel surveys conducted by metropolitan areas, states and localities. , url-status=dead

References

External links

Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive
Transportation planning Online archives of the United States Open-access archives