Triad Travel Counts is a source of data used by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) and regional planning departments to identify existing deficiencies in the transportation system in the Triad region and to help ensure your tax dollars are used wisely.

The survey will be conducted with 4,800 households across the Triad region, which includes all of Alamance, Caswell, Davidson, Davie, Forsyth, Guilford, Orange, Randolph, Rockingham, Stokes, Surry, and Yadkin counties.

Randomly selected households are initially contacted by mail and asked to respond to a brief survey about their household. Next, households are asked to keep track of the places they go for one day, and to provide details about each place. Participants are able to report their travel details online, over the phone, or in real-time using a smartphone app.

Data from the 4,800 participating households will give us enough information to create a larger picture of travel patterns across the entire region and help identify future needs.

Triad Travel Counts is sponsored by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) with support from regional planning agencies including the Burlington/Graham Metropolitan Planning Organization (BGMPO), the Greensboro Metropolitan Planning Organization (GUAMPO), the High Point Metropolitan Planning Organization (HPMPO), the Winston-Salem Metropolitan Planning Organization (WSMPO), and Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation (PART).

A major responsibility of these agencies includes analyzing the performance of the region's transportation system and distributing federal funds for project implementation. NCDOT works closely with partner agencies to develop long-range transportation improvements that serve all parts of the region to the greatest extent possible.

Triad Travel Counts is partially funded with federal planning and research funds through the NCDOT. Funds in this pool are not eligible for road improvement projects. In other words, these funds must only be used to guide transportation investments.

Westat (www.Westat.com) is an industry-leading survey research organization with over 50 years of experience designing and conducting research studies in a wide range of subject areas. They have 20 years of experience conducting national, statewide, and regional transportation-related research. Their transportation survey team is responsible for administering Triad Travel Counts.

You have an opportunity to help your community. A survey of this type is typically conducted only once in a decade, at most, and sometimes even less frequently. By participating and recording your travel behavior, your household will be one of only a few thousand to represent the entire region.

The information that your household and other households in the survey provide will help build a complete and accurate picture of regional and local transportation needs so that public funds for improvements can be spent where they are needed most.

Households have been randomly selected from a list of residential addresses to ensure people from all parts of the region can participate. Of these randomly selected households, all will be contacted first by mail and some may receive a follow-up phone call. Your household may have been chosen even if your telephone number is unlisted or is on a DoNotCall list. (Westat and other survey research organizations are exempt from DoNotCall lists as they are not a telemarketing firm and are not trying to sell anything. Westat is solely a survey research organization.) Everyone in the region has an equal chance of being selected to participate in the survey.

It is possible that your address has been selected to participate, but because invitations are sent out over several months, you may have been selected but not yet notified by mail. To see if you have been selected, contact us with the information requested. If you are selected to participate, we will let you know how to join the survey.

Surveys like these typically offer incentives out of respect for the value of the participants’ time. Research shows that far fewer people agree to take part in surveys when no incentive is offered. Often, the costs to conduct the survey are lower when a modest incentive is offered. We believe incentives are the best use of the survey budget in order to maximize the number of people willing to take part.

Westat, the research organization administering Triad Travel Counts is paying the incentives. NCDOT and the regional agencies are not providing funding for the survey incentives.

A household consists of an entire group of people who live in one dwelling unit and share a kitchen.

The number, timing and types of trips made are affected by the characteristics of the person and the household in which he or she lives. A person's age, gender, employment status, number of vehicles and household income all affect his or her travel decisions. This information is needed to make sure that we are collecting information from all kinds of households in the region.

The data collected from the survey will be summarized to describe the travel behaviors of all households in the region. More specifically, information provided by all participants will be used to summarize the general activities people engage in, the means of travel used to get to these activities, where trips are coming from and going to, the extent to which trips are combined together (e.g., grouping together your errands), and the time of day trips are made.

A publicly available dataset will also be developed from the information collected but it will not contain any personally identifiable information so your privacy will be protected. For more information about how the data will be protected, review the Privacy Statement.

The travel information you provide will be used to help improve roads, including walking and bicycling options throughout the Triad region. For example, knowing where and how people travel helps determine which roads are used more than others and may need widening, and where sidewalks or bicycle lanes would be useful. The information is also used by air quality agencies to better understand how motorized travel contributes to vehicle emissions.

As required by law, we will keep your personal information confidential. We do not sell any personal contact information. Your name and other identifying information will not be shared with anyone outside of the research team.

Everyone's experience is a bit different, so the time needed to take the survey will vary. The number of people in your household, the number of trips made, and other factors determine the actual length of the survey.

Participants are first asked to complete a brief survey about their household, and that usually takes around 10-15 minutes. Later they are asked to tell us about the places you and the other members of your household went on your travel day. This step takes about 20 – 25 minutes per household member.

No, your personal information will not be made available to the public. While key findings about travel behavior drawn from the survey will be combined with the information from all participating households and summarized, this information will be general in nature and will relate to regional transportation areas of interest. No identifying information will be shared. For example, statistics about transportation mode choices or peak travel times across day of week will be reported among many other region-wide statistics. A publicly available dataset will also be developed from the information collected but it will not contain any personally identifiable information so your privacy will be protected.

As required by law, your specific activities and travel patterns will remain confidential, as will any contact information you provide (your name, home address, phone number, email address, etc.). We will only use your contact information to conduct the survey, or to validate or confirm your survey data.

Triad Travel Counts is voluntary. While some questions are required for participation, you may decline to answer any question. Your privacy will be respected. As required by law, any information that you provide through this survey will be kept confidential.

Getting children to and from school creates a significant amount of travel for a household. Often, this affects the travel behaviors of parents or caretakers, not only as it relates to school trips, but how they plan other trips like grocery shopping and running other errands. Knowing where children go to school and how they get there will help us better understand how other household trips are connected. Getting children to and from school safely is a priority in all transportation planning. No identifying information about your children will be made available to the public.

o A significant amount of travel is made by people going to and from work, and by people at work. We want to better understand what types of travel are generated by different types of jobs.

On any given day, many households will have a “non-ordinary” travel day. But collectively, all these variations—less travel, more travel, and different-than-usual travel—balance out. So even if your assigned travel day is out-of-the-ordinary for you or someone else in your household, it is important that you report what actually occurred that day.

You will be asked to record your travel just as if you were traveling within the region. However, if you know in advance that your ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD will not be in the region at all on your travel day, let us know (Contact Us) and we can try to reschedule your travel day. However, if only some members of your household are out of the region on your assigned travel date, we would still like to collect data from your household on the assigned travel date.

Some people feel that just because all they do is visit a friend or go to the post office, this information is not important. In fact, people who make few or no trips on their travel day, are just as important as people who makes many trips. If we include only households that go a lot of places in the survey, we would over-represent the number of trips made daily in the region.

The purpose of the survey is to get a complete and accurate picture of travel throughout the region. So even if you didn’t go anywhere on the day you were asked to record your trips, we would still like to know.

We are interested in all the ways that people get around the region — whether you walk, use the bus, ride a bicycle, take a taxi, Uber, Lyft or electric scooter, or drive a car, truck, or motorcycle. Even if you are homebound, we still want to make sure your household is included in the survey as it is equally as important as other households.