Tools: The Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS)

I’ve recently been involved creating a new survey for measuring transportation behavior, particularly walking and cycling.  The Pedestrian and Bicycling Survey (PABS) is a mail out/mail back survey designed to be an inexpensive means for local governments to learn about nonmotorized transportation use in their communities.

An important component of the design of the PABS was creating a probabilistic sampling approach that would be relatively straightforward to administer and, if desired, could be carried out in house (within municipal agencies). While other sampling approaches—such as snowball sampling across the internet—can achieve a large number of responses, the probability of any person being asked to take the survey is not known making it a challenge to generalize from the sample to the wider population.

Pedestrians in suburban Hong Kong
Documentation includes a report outlining how the survey was developed and the results of reliability (repeatability) sampling. A manual provides step by step guidance about how to use the survey too. The survey is provided at the end of both documents and is available in English and Spanish. Materials are available for download at http://transweb.sjsu.edu/project/ 2907.html (scroll down to find the manual).

Future plans include creating a more modular version so users can mix and match sections to suit the questions they need answered. Updates will be available at http://www.designforhealth.net/health/PABS.html.

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