The U.S. Metropolitan Travel Survey Archive is a project to store, preserve, and make publicly available, via the internet, travel surveys conducted by metropolitan areas, states and localities.
As of 2007, the archive held 58 surveys comprising 2,718,329 trip records, 516,108 person records, 219,097 household records, 173,354 vehicle records, and 528,847 location records. Similar to this U.S. archive, an international archive of travel survey date has been suggested so that this service is expanded into more countries.
The motivation behind the archive is to forestall the loss of electronic files and documentation of surveys, which has befallen previous surveys. These surveys are both costly to conduct, and irreplaceable as it is impossible to reconstruct past records of human travel behavior. The archive was established with funding from the United States Department of Transportation.
Famous quotes containing the words metropolitan, travel, survey and/or archive:
“In metropolitan cases, the love of the most single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“He will trouble the thoughts of men
yet for many an aeon,
they will travel far and wide,
they will discuss all his written words,
his pen will be sacred.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)