Introduction

The Travel Behavior Inventory is a study of household demographics, daily travel activities, and typical transportation patterns throughout the greater Twin Cities region conducted approximately every 10 years since 1949. The Met Council conducted the most recent study in 2010, with a household travel diary survey of approximately 12,000 households and supplemental surveys including a transit on-board survey, airport survey, and visitor surveys. In 2018, the project team developed a recurrent study program to collect study data more frequently, which is conducted by RSG on behalf of the Met Council and its partners the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT) This recurrent study program introduced administrative efficiencies and operational improvements for data collection enabling the Met Council to collect more current, detailed data for use in travel models and planning analysis.

Study Objectives

Key objectives of the Travel Behavior Inventory include the following:

• Collecting core information on household demographics, typical travel behavior, and regional transportation patterns to support the Met Council’s transportation modeling and planning needs.
  
• Capturing information about new transportation modes and behaviors to keep pace with rapid changes in the transportation industry.
  
• Employing a thorough, multi-pronged approach to obtain a representative sample of the population in the final dataset.
  
• Leveraging new technologies and methods to obtain a more complete, detailed, high-quality dataset.

Study Area

The study used a sample frame consistent with previous Travel Behavior Inventories: the seven-county Twin Cities metro area (which comprises the Met Council planning area), nine adjoining ring counties in Minnesota, and three counties in Wisconsin. The study area holds approximately 1.4 million households (2019 ACS).

Figure 1: Study Area

Study Timeline

The scope of work for this project included the design and administration of a mixed-mode data collection approach, with smartphone-based retrieval of up to seven days of travel data as the primary methodology, supplemented with traditional online and call center-based data collection.

The Travel Behavior Inventory planned for approximately 12 months of data collection every other year. Data collection in 2021 was delayed, and then the timeline compressed, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Table 1: Sample Overview by Survey Year

	Survey Year	First Travel Date	Last Travel Date	Unweighted Counts
				Households	Persons	Travel Days	Trips
	2019	2018-10-05	2019-09-29	7,516	15,434	79,556	335,284
	2021	2021-06-22	2022-02-05	7,907	15,031	49,567	180,242
	2023	2023-01-12	2024-01-16	3,749	7,280	28,838	108,413
Total	—	—	—	19,172	37,745	157,961	623,939