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Airline Passenger Survey Data & Reports

A separate web page discusses past airline passenger surveys conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Household Travel Survey Data and Reports

Most Recent Survey Reports (Bay Area Travel Survey 2000)


Several household travel surveys have been conducted in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area over the past fifty-plus years. These surveys serve as the centerpiece of the region's efforts to redevelop regional travel demand model systems, and to describe changes in travel patterns of Bay Area residents. The following table shows some summary characteristics of the five major household travel surveys conducted in the Bay Area between 1946 and the present:
Year of Survey Type of Survey Survey Duration Type of Diary Number of Completed
Household Samples
1946/47 Home Interview Single Day
(Weekday Only)		 Trip Recall 27,703
1965 Home Interview Single Day Trip Recall 30,686
1981 Telephone Single Day Trip Memory Jogger 7,209
1990 Telephone Single and Multi-Weekday
(3 and 5-day)		 Trip Memory Jogger 10,838
1996 Telephone Multi-Day
(two-day)
Including Weekend Days		 Activity Diary, Including In-Home Activities 5,861
2000 Telephone Multi-Day
(two-day)
Including Weekend Days		 Activity Diary, Including In-Home Activities 15,000

Data from the long forgotten 1946/47 Bay Area Metropolitan Traffic Survey is not available. This was the first household travel survey ever conducted in the San Francisco region. Data was collected from households in the central Bay Area (San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Daly City) as part of transportation studies to study potential "southern crossings" across the San Francisco Bay.

The 1996 MTC household travel survey final report and data is available for downloading. Point your web browser to the FTP directory: ftp://ftp.abag.ca.gov/pub/mtc/planning/BATS/BATS96/

The 2000 MTC household travel survey data and consultant final report is available for downloading. The directory to the consultant's final report, in two volumes, is here: ftp://ftp.abag.ca.gov/pub/mtc/planning/BATS/BATS2000/BATS%20Final%20Report/
The directory to the currently available data files is here: ftp://ftp.abag.ca.gov/pub/mtc/planning/BATS/BATS2000/

For questions on the data or reports from MTC travel surveys please contact Mr. Chuck Purvis of MTC at: 510-817-5755, or e-mail: cpurvis@mtc.ca.gov.

Changes in Regional Travel Characteristics and Travel Time Expenditures in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1960-1990.

Online version (59KB) of a paper that was presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, January 1994. A zipped archive version of this paper is also available for downloading (65KB).The files in this archive are in "rich text format" and excel spreadsheet format.

San Francisco Bay Area 1990 Regional Travel Characteristics: Working Paper #4.

A 209-page report on the final weighted and expanded results from the 1990 MTC household travel survey. Contains dozens of tables reporting on trips by trip purpose and travel mode; trip rates per household and per person; travel characteristics by age, gender, employment status, disability, and family life cycle; and estimates of average weekday county-level travel. An online version of this report (154KB) is available on the USDOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics' website. Or, you may download (721KB) a zipped archive version of this paper. The files in this archive are in "rich text format" and excel spreadsheet format.

Other sites with MTC Survey Reports

The reader is encouraged to visit the Bureau of Transportation Statistics web site at: http://www.bts.gov/. If you search on such terms as "MTC" and "survey" you are likely to turn up several MTC working papers on the 1981 and 1990 household travel surveys. BTS "scanned" in these documents, so they're not as easy to read as the "hard copy" version.
Page Last Updated: September 9, 2004, CLPurvis