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Florida Travel Surveys
Introduction
The transportation modeling and planning community in Florida relies heavily on travel survey data to develop, calibrate, and validate travel demand forecasting models, to evaluate alternatives, assess impacts of policies and multimodal plans, and quantify travel demand by purpose, time, location, and mode. Various metropolitan areas and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) Districts have spend considerable resources over the past 10-15 years collecting detailed travel survey data to serve as a basis for developing accurate travel demand forecasting models within a FSUTMS context.

More recently, there has been widespread interest in the development and validation of transit models that require reliable and accurate on-board transit survey data for calibrating mode choice models and checking ridership forecasts. Despite the widespread interest and the explicit recognition of the importance of collecting travel survey data, many areas simply cannot afford such data collection efforts.

Travel surveys are expensive, labor intensive, complex, and time-consuming efforts that many small and medium metropolitan areas cannot afford. The Statewide Model Task Force established the Travel Survey and Data Committee in May 2004 with a view towards facilitating the advancement of survey procedures and survey data collection and analysis in the state.

This section of the FSUTMSOnline is intended to provide data and travel survey statistics available from different regions in the state of Florida for a range of area types and in establishing a set of state-of-the-art survey procedures and guidelines that areas can adopt if they would like to proceed with a local travel survey effort. Focus is placed on passenger travel demand (as opposed to freight transportation). Thus, this section is an exhaustive resource of urban and long distance passenger travel data for all modes of transportation including travel characteristics in non-urban areas. Also, it places particular emphasis on on-board transit surveys and external (roadside) surveys and offers alternative methodologies for conducting roadside surveys.