Comparing Data Quality and Cost from Three Modes of On-Board Transit Surveys

Many transit agencies invest substantial resources in surveying their passengers to generate data used for planning, marketing, and equity analyses. Within the industry, there is considerable interest in replacing traditional paper-based self-complete surveys with new approaches that might lower costs or generate better quality data. However, very limited research has been done to identify the relative performance of different survey modes. This paper begins to fill that gap. The research presented investigates the relative data quality for three different bus passenger survey methods distributed or administered on the transit vehicle: self-complete paper surveys, self-complete online surveys, and interviewer-assisted tablet-based surveys. The research used an experimental design, with the same survey questionnaire distributed via three different survey modes. All factors about the survey and distribution process were kept identical to the extent feasible, so that the only variation would be the survey mode itself. The findings by survey mode are compared in terms of the survey return and completion rates, the response rate for individual questions, respondent socio-demographics, and labor costs per complete. The study results suggest that for many agencies, the old-fashioned, low-tech paper survey may still be the best option for bus passenger surveys. The paper mode required less labor per complete, and for many of the metrics discussed it generated data that was often as good as—or better than—the tablet survey. In addition, the findings suggest that online surveys administered on the transit vehicle are not a good option, as they were labor intensive and by most metrics failed to produce higher-quality data than the other modes.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP015 Transit Capacity and Quality of Service.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Agrawal, Asha Weinstein
  • Granger-Bevan, Stephen
  • Newmark, Gregory L
  • Nixon, Hilary
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bus transit; Cost effectiveness; Data collection; Data quality; Passengers; Public opinion; Questionnaires; Surveys
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01551036
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-1831
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 27 2015 11:21AM