Results of the 2016-17 Campus Travel Survey

The UC Davis Campus Travel Survey is a joint effort by the Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS) and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, part of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. Since 2007 the survey has been administered each fall by a graduate student at the Institute of Transportation Studies. The main purpose of the survey is to collect annual data on how the UC Davis community travels to campus, including mode choice, vehicle occupancy, distances traveled, and carbon emissions. Over the past ten years, the travel survey results have been used to assess awareness and utilization of campus transportation services and estimate demand for new services designed to promote sustainable commuting at UC Davis. Data from the campus travel survey have also provided researchers with valuable insights about the effects of attitudes and perceptions of mobility options on commute mode choice. This year’s survey is the tenth administration of the campus travel survey. The 2016-17 survey was administered online in October and November 2016, distributed by email to a stratified random sample of 24,029 students, faculty, and staff (out of an estimated total population of 45,380). About 19 percent (4,448 individuals) of those contacted responded to this year’s survey, with 16.1 percent actually completing it. For the statistics presented throughout this report, we weight the responses by role (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, Master’s student, PhD student, faculty, and staff) and gender so that the proportion of respondents in each group reflects their proportion in the campus population. The weighting methodology depends on an accurate estimate of the campus population by role and gender. For the 2016-17 survey, campus administrators used a new protocol to estimate faculty and staff population for the campus. The new protocol produced a higher estimate of the number of staff and a lower estimate of the number of faculty in 2016-17 than in 2015-16, meaning that the responses of staff are given more weight and those of faculty less weight in this year’s results (see Appendix H: Weighting by role and gender” for more information). This change in protocol affects the comparison of 2016-17 results to 2015-16 results, and the comparisons presented below may not accurately reflect the true changes in travel to campus. The 2017-18 survey will use the new protocol and will thus provide a more accurate estimate of changes from 2016-2017 to 2017-18.