Tell us how you get around and help chart Arizona’s transportation future

PHOENIX – How do you get around, Arizona?

Spend a little time sharing what takes you from place to place and you’ll help inform how we all get around in the future.

The Arizona Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration are asking households, most of them outside of metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson, to participate in the National Household Travel Survey. Up to 30,000 Arizona households, chosen at random, will be contacted by letter over the next year.

It’s important that as many households as possible participate because the answers will help state, local and federal officials decide when, where and how to invest limited transportation funding to improve roads, public transportation, sidewalks, bikeways and more.

“Taking part in the National Household Travel Survey requires just a few easy steps with one purpose: We want to hear your travel story,” ADOT Director John Halikowski said. “Your answers are valuable no matter how you get from place to place.”

For those who aren’t invited to participate in the National Household Travel Survey, ADOT has created an online survey. Information gathered through this survey will also help create a more valuable transportation system for all.

The National Household Travel Survey, conducted every five to seven years, provides an essential snapshot of transportation behaviors and trends by asking how members of a household get around on one day.

Participation, which is voluntary, starts with filling out a brief survey that comes with the invitation letter and returning it in a prepaid envelope. That takes about 10 minutes. Participants receive travel logs to record where members of their household go on an assigned travel day. Then they provide the information online or by phone, a process that usually takes 20 to 25 minutes.

Using a federal grant, ADOT has commissioned extra survey responses from beyond the Phoenix and Tucson areas to learn more about travel behaviors and trends in rural Arizona. The goal is for about 80 percent of all National Household Travel Survey participants to live beyond the Sun Corridor.

By law, all information provided is kept confidential, will be used only for research and cannot be sold. Names and other identifying information aren’t linked with the survey data used to create statistical summaries.