Simulated Household Travel Survey Data: Synthetic Data in Australia

Abstract

method has been developed to synthesize household travel survey data from a combination of Census and national transport survey data sources. The procedure, described in other papers, involves creating distributions of pertinent variables (numbers of trips by purpose, mode of travel, time of day of travel, and trip length) that can be used to estimate travel-demand models. A sample of local residents is then drawn from disaggregate census data, providing detailed information on the socioeconomic characteristics of the sample. Using these socioeconomic characteristics, travel data are simulated from the transport data distributions using Monte Carlo simulation. This procedure was developed in the United States in the past four years. The paper describes the application of this procedure to Adelaide, South Australia, for which an actual household travel survey exists from 1999. The paper describes results obtained from applying the generic data as the basis of the simulation. Results are compared between the synthetic and real data to determine the closeness of the match between the data sets. The procedure uses data derived from a nationwide travel survey in the U.S., but uses census data for Adelaide from the 1996 ABS Census, using the one percent sample. The purpose of this research was to determine the extent to which the trip characteristics distributions from the U.S. could be used in Australia. It is concluded that the procedure performs about as well as the process was shown to perform in Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Baton Rouge in the U.S. This process holds out considerable promise as a means to increase available samples for local and corridor planning, as well as to provide data for regions that have typically not been able to undertake household travel surveys on the scale of those being conducted in the Melbourne and Sydney regions.