Census Transportation Planning Package for Urban Areas Now Available from DOT

Contact DOT 54-97 BTS Product Line 202-366-DATA Ernest Wilson Technical Support 202-366-6664

Wednesday, April 16, 1997 -- U. S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater today announced that the Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) for urban areas is now available on CD-ROM from the department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

The CTPP urban package contains characteristics of persons, workers and households for traffic analysis zones, census block groups or census tracts, depending on local preferences. The CTPP is a set of special tabulations of 1990 census data tailored to meet the data needs of transportation planners. Two sets of data packages were produced from the 1990 census: packages for each state and the District of Columbia, released in 1994, and the urban packages for each "CTPP region" defined by Metropolitan Planning Organizations.

The 1990 CTPP is a continuation of a program established for the 1970 census and continued for the 1980 census in the same general format. Production of the 1990 CTPP by the Bureau of the Census was sponsored by the state departments of transportation under a pooled funding arrangement with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Funding to develop the CTPP program was provided by the department's Federal Highway and Federal Transit Administrations.

As with the statewide packages, to make the data contained in the CTPP computer tapes easily accessible and widely available, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics is releasing the urban package on CD-ROM and providing software to display and retrieve the data.

Dr. T. R. Lakshmanan, Director of BTS, said, "We are pleased to be part of this project, which shows how federal, state, and metropolitan agencies can work together to create effective information for transportation decision making. BTS is working with its federal partners to include the journey-to-work questions in the year 2000 Census so that we can continue to serve state and local decision makers with this successful information base into the 21st Century."

For technical assistance in using this CD-ROM, contact Ernest Wilson, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, at (202) 366-6664. For inquiries related to the subject content or the methodology of the CTPP statistics, contact the Journey-to-Work and Migration Statistics Branch, Bureau of the Census, at (301) 457-2454.

To order a copy of the CD-ROM, contact the Bureau of Transportation Statistics by phone at (202) 366-DATA, FAX on (202) 366-3640, or by writing the Bureau of Transportation Statistics at BTS/DOT, 400 Seventh Street, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20590. The data also may be ordered on the Internet worldwide web at http://www.bts.gov under "Products and Services."