CE 573 Transportation Planning - Fall 2001

Administration Course materials Other links
week 1 week 2 week 3 week 4
week 5 week 6 week 7 week 8
week 9 week 10 week 11 week 12
week 13 week 14 week 15

Assignment  06

Overview

The purpose of this assignment is to learn how to use the license plate survey to collect origin-destination data and to learn how to process this data to determine travel patterns along an arterial roadway.  We will conduct the license plate survey on Sixth Street, on the University of Idaho campus, on Wednesday, September 19th during the morning peak period and midday period, both for periods of one hour.  From the data that you collect, you will be able to determine the proportion of traffic that uses Sixth Street for through travel and the proportion that uses Sixth Street for local travel and access to the university.

Field Data Collection

The survey will be conducted on Wednesday, September 19th, from 7:30 am to 8:30 am and from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm.

You will be assigned to one of four locations along Sixth Street.  You will collect data for vehicles that are traveling eastbound.

You will be working with a group of two other students.  Each of you will observe each vehicle that passes by your location and recording the last three characters of the license plate, whether these characters are letters or numbers. For example, if the vehicle has the characters "1L 23543", you would record "543" on your data sheet. 

In addition to the license plate number, you need to record the time at one minute intervals.

If a vehicle passes by and you are not able to record the license number, draw a line in the box on your form.  This will enable you to have a complete record of the total number of vehicles that pass by your point.

The following sample form shows examples of data that are collected for a five minute period:

Location Sixth Street Traffic direction Eastbound
Time (begin) 7:30 am Weather Sunny, warm, dry pavement
Time (end) 7:35 am
Time License Number Time License Number
7:30 345 7:32 KKE
  AHE 7:33 181
  183   299
  339 7:34 PKK
7:31 285   ----
  980   338
  006   938

 

Data Reduction and Checking

Once you have collected your data in the field, you will need to check the data for accuracy and enter your data in an Excel spreadsheet.  Please follow these steps:

  • Set aside some time to work with your partners.
  • Go through each entry in your forms.
  • If there is a disagreement with one or more of the forms, reconcile the difference.  The differences should be in one of the following three groups:  (1) If one or two of you have an entry that is not included in the third recorders data, then the two of you are probably correct.  (2) If one of you has an entry that is different from the other two, it is possible that you are correct, but more likely that the others are correct. (3) If you have entries that are nearly alike but differ in one character, you should include both entries in your final data set to maximize the chance of finding a match with the other observation points.
  • Once you have reconciled your data, enter the times and the license plate characters in your spreadsheet.

You must complete all data reduction and checking for our class meeting on Friday, September 21st.

Click here for a copy of the data collection form.