One of the main challenges faced by transportation professionals is the lack of data to characterize people travel habits and patterns. Absence of good information affects everyone, from an engineer at a consulting firm trying to prepare a transportation impact study, to a planner at a government ministry preparing a new policy. Most transportation professionals are acquainted to decision support systems or have seen a simulation of a travel demand model, and most certainly those familiar with transportation systems, have put their hands-on databases with raw data.
In fact, more and more governments have made their data available to the public. It is common to find web pages listing data in multitudes of formats. There is, however, a new system that is gaining popularity, a system that displays data in tabular and graphical formats, with a spatial interface that allows you to map data and provides simply analytic capabilities to transform such data into meaningful information. These systems are called Transportation Data Management Systems.
Crown Consult has partnered with the Minister of Transportation in Qatar and has developed a Transportation Data Management System that comprises thousands of data entries collected from the field, for a period of nearly 3 years by our surveyors, interviewers and specialized equipment. Crown Consult’s data collection branch, TRQ - Traffic Research Qatar, did a massive data collection campaign to gather:
- Activity-based Household Interviews with socioeconomic profile and a daily travel diary
- Traffic counts (ATC, MCC, TMC) to capture speed profiles, vehicle classification and volume (demand)
- Hotel Surveys to capture socioeconomic characteristics, and travel habits of hotel residents
- Pedestrian and cyclist surveys to capture attitudes and opinions
- Bus on-board surveys to capture ridership, and profile of users
- Stated Preference Surveys to capture potential ridership and willingness to pay for new services
- Airport interviews to capture traveler’s origin and destination and local transportation habits
- Parking surveys to capture demand and willingness to pay for parking
