Christopher D. Muhs

Capturing and Representing Multimodal Trips in Travel Surveys: Review of the Practice

Multimodal trips, or trips that use more than one means of transportation, have historically been underrepresented in travel surveying efforts. This lack of consideration has implications for widely accepted statistics for nonmotorized travel behavior (walking, bicycling, etc.) and affects researchers and professionals in travel modeling, urban planning, public health, and urban design. However, interest in the “last mile” connections to transit, aggregate health impacts of short walking trips, and emphasis on local connectivity require more detailed information on these typically short but important stages of travel. This study reviews approaches to multimodal travel behavior in travel surveys, analyzes their implications, and makes recommendations to improve data collection for the purpose of improved representation of multimodal travel. Particular attention is given to transit access and egress trip segments, nonmotorized travel, use of technology in travel surveys, reporting data, and dissemination of the travel survey beyond the travel forecasting community.

Consumer behavior and travel mode: An exploration of restaurant, drinking establishment, and convenience store patrons

ABSTRACT Many cities are making investments in nonautomobile infrastructure, but few rigorous studies have examined the implications of potential modes shifts on local businesses. This article examines the relationship between mode of access, consumer spending, and frequency of patronage at 78 restaurants, drinking establishments, and convenience stores in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. Multiple regression models were estimated to investigate the factors influencing customer expenditures per trip. Mode choice was not a significant predictor of spending per trip, and nonautomobile customers were more frequent patrons, on average, than customers who arrived via automobile. Although limited to the three land-uses studies, findings of this analysis do not support the notion that customers who arrive by automobile are more competitive consumers than those traveling by other modes, and build support for the notion that more environmentally sustainable transportation modes are also economically viable.

Evolving ITE Trip Generation Handbook: Proposal for Collecting Multimodal, Multicontext, Establishment-Level Data

This paper outlines a new perspective on data collection to inform site-level trip generation studies with amendments to ITEs Trip Generation Handbook in mind. The data collection proposed here is informed by the authors’ experiences in a study that aimed to adjust trip generation rates for an urban context. In this study, a consistent, reliable method for adjusting ITEs trip generation rates to account for increased non-automobile travel in different urban contexts was developed. On the basis of these experiences, the design presented here proposes more emphasis on collecting information on person counts and on how those person trips are distributed across various modes, including walking, cycling, and transit. This paper advocates a move from the vehicle-based counts used historically in these studies to a focus on how new development affects all users of transportation systems.