Simple, Inexpensive Approach to Sampling for Pedestrian and Bicycle Surveys

Abstract

Many transportation planners undertake local surveys for a better understanding of the levels of walking and cycling of residents in their city or town. This paper explores the challenges of designing a robust sampling strategy for such surveys. A review of existing surveys on nonmotorized transportation demonstrated that many existing surveys used less than ideal sampling approaches for communities that were aiming to collect populationwide data on cycling and walking and thereby jeopardized the strength of their conclusions. Either surveys used approaches that were too expensive and complex for most communities to implement or surveys generated data that were not applicable to all residents in a community (i.e., data that were not generalizable to the full population). In response to that sampling problem, this paper presents a new method for collecting generalizable data: the sampling method developed in the Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) project. PABS offers a rigorous, yet inexpensive, simple, and well-documented method to conduct surveys. The PABS mail-out-mail-back survey and probabilistic (generalizable) sampling approach can be performed in-house within municipal agencies. With the use of PABS, transportation professionals can obtain higher-quality data about their community as a whole than they would obtain with many of the other existing approaches. PABS is thus a useful complement to other sampling approaches such as intercept surveys (an important way to collect data on the use of specific facilities) or surveys distributed to e-mail lists (a cheap and useful way to collect qualitative data).