MPO staff outlines new traffic model and reliance on National Household Travel Survey data
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Summary
MPO staff said the agency is building a new traffic model and will use the 2022 National Household Travel Survey for trip‑type inputs (work trips ~29% of total); staff encouraged respondents to complete the 2025 NHTS to improve local data and flagged anomalous long‑distance trip counts for follow‑up.
Doug, representing MPO/TIP staff, told the Technical Transportation Committee the MPO is developing a new traffic model and must rely on trip‑type data to calibrate trip generation.
Because the area lacks a recent local household travel survey, Doug said staff used the 2022 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) to estimate trip types for the Lafayette/West Lafayette area. He highlighted an annual trip total and said work trips represented roughly 29% of trips—an important target for calibrating trip‑generation rates in the model. "If we break that down into a percentage, roughly, the work trip is, like, 29%," Doug said.
A committee member questioned an unexpectedly large NHTS figure showing tens of thousands of non‑work trips to Los Angeles; Doug and others noted such numbers can reflect households with local mailing addresses but workplaces far away, temporary workers, or other sampling anomalies and recommended closer review of the raw data before drawing conclusions.
Doug encouraged committee members who receive the 2025 NHTS to complete it; he said respondents sometimes receive an incentive for participation and that the survey will help produce better local inputs for the model. Staff said they will circulate the NHTS extracts to members for informational use and flagged a forthcoming data packet.