Publication Date: Wednesday, September 14, 2005
How Palo Altans travel
How Palo Altans travel
(September 14, 2005) by Bill D'Agostino
Palo Alto adults like their bicycles but shun public transit.
That's one obvious conclusion from "electronic travel diaries" that 980 adult residents filled out last May. The results of the anonymous, city-sponsored survey will be discussed at a lunchtime symposium Friday in City Hall.
The Palo Altans who responded reported using their bicycles for 8.3 percent of their daily trips. The national and statewide averages are only .4 percent and .7 percent, according to other surveys.
However, Palo Alto adults only used public transportation for 3.4 percent of their trips. That's on par with the statewide average, but below the nationwide average of 4.7 percent.
Most of Palo Altans' trips -- nearly 80 percent -- were taken in automobiles.
The diaries were designed to find out how, when and why Palo Alto adults travel. The responders were asked to record detailed information about each of their trips, up to six a day, on the Internet. (A trip was defined as a person moving from one address to another.)
The data will be used to mark the progress of Palo Alto's transportation policies, which aim to make travel safer and encourage locals to use alternatives to automobiles.
"We think the data is powerful and will teach us powerful lessons," said Chief Transportation Official Joe Kott.
One of the surprising results is that the highest-ranked traffic problem Palo Alto adults had was "distracted drivers," which slightly surpassed other issues such as speeding drivers, the price of gasoline and highway congestion.
Among other results:
* the average commute to work was 9.3 miles;
* The most popular hour of travel was 8 a.m. More than 11 percent of trips were taken that hour. By contrast, the next most popular hours of travel -- the 7 a.m., 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. hours -- only had around 8 percent of travelers each;
* 30 percent of trips were two miles or shorter; and
*40 percent of trips were less than 10 minutes long.
Future surveys will poll Palo Alto youth and commuters who travel to Palo Alto, to give a complete picture of the city's traffic patterns, Kott said.
The free lunchtime symposium will be held in the Council Conference Room at City Hall (250 Hamilton Ave.) on Friday, Sept. 16 at noon.
Staff Writer Bill D'Agostino can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com.
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