University of Wisconsin-Madison
OP-16: Student Commute Modal Split

Data was compiled as part of the 2018 Biennial Transportation Survey (completed April 9, 2019 and available here: https://fpmts.wiscweb.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/28/2019/04/2018-Biennial-Transportation-Survey-Report.pdf)

The survey targets were registered UW-Madison students, UW-Madison faculty and staff, and UW Hospital and Clinics staff. The survey targets were identified by collecting email addresses from data sources. If a member of the above identified groups did not have an email address on file, they were not included in the final survey sample. It is assumed that the majority of survey targets had an active email address.

Email addresses were sampled from the following populations:
- 8,961 records were obtained from UW Health for all employees that may work at the UW Hospital main campus.
- 44,262 records were obtained from the Registrar’s office for enrolled UW - Madison students.
- 21,224 records were obtained from the UW-Madison Office of Human Resources.

A target of 500 responses for each of the three categories has been used in past surveys and was the target for this survey. Sampling 2,000 faculty and staff and 2,000 UW Hospital employees will typically yield at least 500 responses each. To obtain 500 responses from students the sample size was increased to 3,500 due to the consistently low response rate of this segment.

Microsoft Excel was used to generate random numbers. These random numbers were assigned to email addresses. Those numbers were then sorted from lowest to highest and the first 2,000 (fac/staff & hospital) or 3,500 (student) records were selected for sampling.

Survey invitations were sent via email beginning on Tuesday October 30th, 2018. A second email contained a reminder to take the survey and was sent eight (8) days after the first email. A third email (second reminder) was sent eight (8) days after the first reminder to take the survey. The survey closed at 5PM on November 21th, 2018. See Table 2 on Page 5 of the report for details on the response rate.

Commuting option results are displayed in Table 5 on Page 8. Respondents were asked to provide their primary mode of commuting in good weather and bad weather with respondents determining their own definition of good and bad. Without a clear definition of good and bad weather Office of Sustainability staff analyzed 11 years of weather data with the following characteristics constituting bad weather:
- Precipitation greater than 1 inch
- Snowfall greater than 0.75 inches
- Snow depth greater than 0 inches
- Average temperature below 20 degrees
- Average temperature above 90 degrees

This analysis determined that bad weather constituted 25.8% of commuting days. This was used to weight the average survey response between bad weather and good weather mode choice.

Survey data on students utilizing the "Drop-Off" mode was included in the "Vanpool or Carpool" input. Survey data on students utilizing an "Other" mode was not included in the data reported above.