Tool for querying the National Household Travel Survey data

Abstract

The goal of the project is to create a database for storing the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) data, and a user interface to query the database. Currently, the survey data is stored in excel files in the CSV format, which makes it hard to perform complex analyses over the data. Analyses of interest to transportation community include comparisons of the trips made by urban household to those made by rural household, finding the average trip time spent based on ethnicity, the total travel time of a particular household, the preferred vehicle by a specific household, average time spent per shopping trip, etc. The tool designed for the purpose of querying the NHTS database is a Python-based Web application. Django is used as the Web framework for this project and PostgreSQL is used for the back-end purpose. The user interface consists of various drop-down lists, text-boxes, buttons and other user interface components that facilitate querying the database and presenting the results in formats that allow easy interpretation. FusionCharts Django-Wrapper and FusionCharts Jquery-Plugin are used to visualize the data in the chart form. A Codebook of the NHTS dataset is also linked for the reference purpose at any point for the user. The tool built in the project allows the user to get a deeper understanding of the data, not only by plotting the data in the form of line charts, bar charts, two column graph, but also by providing the results of the queries in the CSV format for further analysis.