Front Range Travel Counts is the first in-depth study of urban household travel behavior along Colorado’s Front Range, from Fort Collins to Pueblo. From this August through the fall of 2010, the four Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) along the Front Range will randomly ask approximately 12,000 households to identify where and how each member of the household traveled on a specific, designated travel day (24 hours). The MPOs include the North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Denver Regional Council of Governments, the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments, and the Pueblo Area Council of Governments. The Colorado Department of Transportation and the Regional Transportation District also are survey partners.

The cost of the joint household survey for the Front Range is about $2 million with the NFRMPO contributing about 10 - 15%. Front Range Travel Counts will be conducted in the North Front Range region first, beginning in August and running through the fall. Front Range Travel Counts will randomly call households to participate. Once enrolled, participants will receive a travel diary and instructions for recording travel.

To ensure the study reaches a representative sample, each household also will be asked about
access to transportation and socioeconomic characteristics. Household travel diary surveys are valuable because they gather data on a large number of households and household members, and the trips that those particular individuals make on a specific day. The survey doesn’t ask for opinions; it asks what people did. This enables transportation planners to tie individual and household characteristics to the trips actually made, seeing how, for instance, the number of automobiles a household owns or having small children in a household
affects daily activities.

Data from the survey will help the MPOs build fuller, more accurate pictures of local transportation needs and estimate how much travel is generated by all households along the Front Range. The outputs of travel models built with the survey data will reveal regional travel patterns and behavior, which can help local, state and federal officials make informed transportation decisions by evaluating and prioritizing different regional projects for federal funding. In addition, communities need accurate models to be eligible to receive federal funding for their transportation projects.

For more information about the household survey, please visit www.nustats.com/FrontRange or call the survey hotline at 1-888-222-7734. Additional survey contacts include Arvilla Kirchhoff of the North Front Range Metropolitan Planning Organization, 970-224-6147 or akirchhoff@nfrmpo.org; Erik Sabina of the Denver Regional Council of Governments, 303-480-6789 or esabina@drcog.org; or Julie Paasche of NuStats, 1-800-447-8287, ext. 2241, or jpaasche@nustats.com.