Re: [CTPP] Experimental Census Forms

"Granato, Sam" wrote: During the middle of the 1980's and again around 1995 the issue of content for the decennial census came under congressional question. As a result, there was a great deal of discussion about the content in and amongst the transportation planning community on how, why and the uses of the decennial transportation related data. In fact, this has been a topic of several conferences etc, and several publications exist on it and are published through TRB. The references to them are listed here (the page is getting updated and more resources will be added in the near future). http://www.mcs.com/~berwyned/census/publicat.html A slightly broader and more comprehensive publication that speaks to our data needs is "Information Needs to Support State and Local Transportation Decisionmaking into the 21st Century--CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS 14". It is available on-line at http://www.bts.gov/site/news/dataneeds/ Going back to the historic issues for a moment, and Sam's question... In the mid 1980's we in the transportation planning community, though our various policy boards, regional councils and the like had to "lobby" our congressional representatives to save the transportation content on the long form. By the mid 1990's simply writing letters was not sufficient. At that point, I think it was OMB, spearheaded a 'zero based' approach to justify the legal basis of each question on the long form. For the transportation community this meant that each question was scrutinized as to its use and legal basis. Although constitutionally the census only needs to count people, it was quickly discovered that many of the planning related mandates that Congress has placed on states and MPOs rely on long form data. A web page that speaks to the specific federal laws that require transportation related information is http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pv.html#PLACE I suspect others along the way can add more to this part of discussion since I only scratched the surface... Personally, I find it interesting that there is such a concern about the data being asked on the long form. A whole side of the issue that seems to have gotten away in all of the "headline grabbing" is a genuine need for more data...mulitple jobs per person comes quickly to mind. Another issue that seems to be getting lost in all of this is that the current long form is shaping up to be the last one ever done and as planners we need to be focusing on the next generation of data sources. but i digress...