One of many data collection tools used by the Northeast Ohio Department of Transportation (NOACA) to measure local, regional, and statewide travel and activity patterns. Survey results will help transportation planners determine how to improve roads and public transportation, reduce traffic congestion, and enhance walking and bicycling opportunities. The survey is being conducted in communities like yours throughout NE Ohio. Households are initially contacted by mail and asked to respond to a brief survey about their household. Households are then asked to keep track of the places they go for one day, and to provide details about their travel. Some households may be given an option of reporting their travel for an additional 6 days, or more.

The Northeast Ohio Travel Survey is sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Department of Transportation (NOACA) (website).

Northeast Ohio Travel Survey was funded with federal and regional planning and research funds. Funds in this pool are not eligible to be used directly on road improvement projects. In other words, these funds must only be used to guide transportation investments.

Westat (www.Westat.com) is an industry-leading survey research organization with over 50 years of experience designing and conducting research studies in a wide range of subject areas. They have 20 years of experience conducting national, statewide, and regional transportation-related research. Their transportation survey team is responsible for administering Northeast Ohio Travel Survey.

You have an opportunity to help your community. A survey of this type is typically conducted once every decade. By participating, your household will be one of only 9,000 households representing our region. The information that you provide will help build a more complete and accurate picture of local and regional transportation needs. Regardless of the number of trips you make and whether you travel by car, bus, bicycle, or other means, your input is vital to ensuring that transportation dollars are spent wisely. Households that participate in the survey will also receive a monetary thank you from Westat.

Because transportation impacts everyone, we have carefully selected households across NE Ohio to ensure that survey responses represent the diversity of our state. We strive to include residents from all regions, household incomes, ages, mobility statuses, races, disability statuses, and genders.

A household is defined as one or more related or unrelated persons living together in the same dwelling.

The type, amount, and timing of travel is often affected by household characteristics. Attributes such as household member age, gender, and employment status, the number of vehicles available, and the level of household income have a demonstrated impact on travel behavior. Knowing these characteristics is necessary to ensure that we are gathering information from a diversity of households and that the data collected can properly be expanded to represent the population.

No! Only selected households in the state who received an invitation in the mail are eligible to participate. If your invitation got lost in the mail, or if you heard about the survey through social media or a friend or family member, reach out to our team via Contact Us and we can look up your PIN code so you can join the survey.

The data collected from the survey will be summarized to describe household travel in the state. More specifically, information provided by participants will be used to determine the general activities people engage in, the times and means they travel to those activities, the types of places travelers are coming from and going to, and the extent to which trips are combined (for example, grouping together your errands). For details about how the survey data will be protected, please review the Privacy Statement, below.

The information you provide will be used for planning, maintaining and improving our regional and state transportation system. This includes infrastructure such as freeways, highways, streets, sidewalks and bike lanes, as well as services such as transit.

Everyone's experience is a bit different, so the time needed to take the survey will vary. The number of people in your household, the number of trips made, and other factors determine the actual length of the survey. To get started, participants are asked to complete a brief 5-minute survey about their household. Then, they will be asked to tell us about the places their household went on an assigned day. This step takes about 20-25 minutes per household member.

No. Person names, addresses, place names and other personally identifiable information will never be shared with the public. Only summary information obtained from the survey may be included in publicly available documents. This might include, for example, statistics about transportation mode choices. An anonymized, publicly-available dataset will also be developed from the survey information, but it will not contain any person names, addresses, place names, or other personally identifiable information. As required by law, your specific activities and travel patterns will remain confidential, as will any contact information you provide (your name, home address, phone number, email address, etc.). We will only use your contact information to conduct the survey, or to validate or confirm your survey data.

Participation in Northeast Ohio Travel Survey is voluntary. While some questions are required for participation, you may decline to answer any question. Your privacy will be respected. As required by law, any information that you provide through this survey will be kept confidential.

A significant amount of travel is made by children going to and from school. Often, this affects the travel behavior of their parents or caretakers, not only as it relates to school trips, but how they plan other trips like grocery shopping and running errands. Knowing when and where children go to school and how they get there help researchers, planners, and modelers better understand household trip-making behavior. Getting children to and from school safely is a priority in all transportation planning.

No identifying information about your children is ever made available to the public.

One of the primary reasons for travel is to commute to and from work. A significant amount of travel is also made by people at work. Knowing respondents’ occupations and work locations helps researchers, planners, and modelers better understand how jobs generate travel.

Information about your occupation and work location is used for transportation planning purposes only.

On any given day, many households will have a “non-ordinary” travel day. But collectively, all these variations—less travel, more travel, and different-than-usual travel—balance out. So even if your assigned travel day is out-of-the-ordinary for you or someone else in your household, it is very important that you report what actually occurred on the assigned day. Please do not be tempted to report more or less trips than you actually made on the travel day.

You will be asked to use the travel logs, or smartphone app, just as if you were traveling within your region. However, if you know in advance that your ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD will not be in the state at all on your assigned travel day, please let us know (Contact Us) and we can try to reschedule your travel day. If only some members of your household will be out of the state on your assigned travel date, we would still like to collect data from your household on that date.

Even if you typically travel very little, or not at all, we still need to hear from you! Some people feel that just because all they do is visit a friend or go to the post office, their information is not important. In fact, these people, and those who do not go anywhere at all on their travel day, are just as important as someone who makes many trips. If we include only people that go many places in the survey, we would over-represent daily travel. The purpose of the survey is to get a complete and accurate picture of travel in the area. So even if you did not go anywhere on the day you were asked to record your trips, we would still like to know that. Please do not report more trips than you actually made on your travel day or decline the survey because you do not travel a lot.

We are interested in all the ways that people get around—whether you walk, use the bus, ride a bicycle, use ride-hailing services such as Uber or Lyft, or drive a car, truck, or motorcycle. Even if you are homebound, we still want to make sure your household is included in the survey as it is equally as important as other households.