Northeastern Illinois Railroad Corporation (Metra) hired Canete Medina Consulting Group Inc. to conduct a system-wide origin-destination survey for years 2016 and 2018. The 2018 survey was moved to the Spring of 2019.  New demographics questions were added to the updated questionnaire to meet Title VI federal requirements.  The mail-in option was also removed to maintain the one-page format of the printed paper forms.  The 2019 survey lasted ten weeks involving more than 50 field surveyors and supervisors. Approximately 63,800 surveys were distributed during the survey period and of those, 56,500 valid responses were collected, resulting in a survey cooperation rate of 43% (out of the 130,000 riders surveyed).

The project involved the design of 14 different questionnaires, one for each of the 14 Metra train main and branch lines to be surveyed, and the production of 125,000 questionnaires, including Spanish versions of each questionnaire. The project also included developing the online version of the survey, hiring and training field survey crews, manpower planning for 298 survey assignments, field data collection involving onboard survey for 10 weeks, processing of collected forms, data encoding, checking and auditing of data entry of 56,500 forms, geocoding of the address data, and preparation of the survey methodology report.

Year Completed: 2019