Planners start survey of people's travel habits

Data will help guide future road projects

JARED PABEN

E-Mail

Print Reprint

Text Size:

tool goes here

Some Whatcom County households have started filling out travel logs that will help transportation planners create an accurate picture of how residents get around.

The results will help an informal group of leaders, called the Farmhouse Gang, decide whether and how to plan and lobby for more bus, train or ferry service in northwest Washington.

"Doing the travel survey is prerequisite to doing any plan to expand intercounty service," said Bruce Agnew, director of the Seattle-based Cascadia Center for Regional Development and a member of the Farmhouse Gang. "This is really the first time that the entire North Sound area ... has been done in a comprehensive fashion."

What they're doing: Local transportation planners have started surveying randomly selected households in Whatcom, Skagit and Island counties on their travel habits. In addition, they've also opened a public-opinion survey on transportation that anybody can take. How to take it: The survey is online at the Whatcom Council of Governments Web site. Go to www.wcog.org and click on the link below "Tell us what you think!" at the left.

The Farmhouse Gang got its name because the group of leaders from several counties started meeting more than a decade ago to talk about transportation at The Farmhouse Restaurant in Skagit County.

By December, surveyors will call thousands of randomly selected households in Whatcom, Skagit and Island counties, with the goal of enticing 750 households in Whatcom County and 750 in Skagit and Island counties combined to fill out travel logs. An Austin, Texas-based research company called NuStats is charging $180,000 to do the survey, said Andy Gomez, a transportation planner at the Whatcom Council of Governments.

The money came from a federal government appropriation, but the Skagit Council of Governments didn't spend it on the survey until the Farmhouse Gang gave its nod with an advisory vote, Agnew said.

The Farmhouse Gang kick-started the ongoing project to provide bus service between Bellingham and Mount Vernon, and it's now talking about more rail service to British Columbia and passenger ferry service from Bellingham to Friday Harbor.

The survey data will be used to help update a computer model showing what traffic congestion here will look like in 2040, Gomez said. That model breaks Whatcom County into more than 400 zones and measures the future traffic from each. The data will be public information, and it could do everything from helping private developers and government agencies measure traffic from their proposed projects to guiding elected leaders in deciding which road-improvement projects should be funded, Gomez said.

The data also can have an economic development component, he said. For example, it could show Ferndale city leaders exactly how many people are driving to Bellingham to do their shopping and to go to work, he said.

Gomez said he expects a report on the survey data to be finished by the end of March.