Chittenden County, Vermont

Purpose

The Transportation Sustainability Tracking Tool provides key metrics for evaluating the sustainability of household travel across Chittenden County, Vermont and tracking trends over time. The tool allows users to evaluate changes in greenhouse gas emissions, transportation energy use and travel demand (the amount of driving) at the vehicle, household and person level at many different geographic scales.

The intended purpose of the tool and the metrics provided is to enable evaluations of progress towards transportation sustainability and climate goals in the region. The tool enables users to see where changes are occurring and the pace of those changes.

It is important to understand that the tool is not designed as a replacement for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories used for regulatory purposes. Data in this tool comes from the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles registration and inspection records for Chittenden County for light-duty, personal vehicles. The tool does not contain information on commercial or government vehicle fleets or transit trips. Furthermore, the data represents travel made by people based on where they live. For example, the data can show if people in one community drive more than people in another community. However, the data cannot be used to determine if there is more vehicle traffic in one community versus another because the data does not include information on where people travel.

Explore Real Vehicle Data

Vehicle Travel

Inspection and registration data is available for each vehicle in Vermont, including fuel type, vehicle type, fuel economy, mileage, and the mailing address of the vehicle. This tab contains Chittenden County vehicle information on a per vehicle basis.

Household Travel

This tab contains information on a per household basis. Household metrics were estimated by summing information about each vehicle registered at the same street address. Addresses include unit numbers to account for different households in multi-unit buildings.

Per Capita Travel

This tab contains information on a per person basis. Per capita metrics were estimated by dividing household level metrics by the average household size in each Census block group using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Total Travel

This tab contains an estimated total value for each metric reported by municipality. The metrics are created by multiplying household level metrics by the number of households in each municipality using data from U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Contributors

Acknowledgments

The development of the Transportation Sustainability Tracking Tool was supported with funding from the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission (CCRPC). Additional funding from the National Science Foundation (Award #2228667) contributed to developing the underlying dataset and the National Center for Sustainable Transportation (Award #69A3552344814) contributed to developing the methods to host the tool on the web.

The Transportation Sustainability Tracking Tool was developed by Clare Nelson and Dr. Greg Rowangould at the University of Vermont Transportation Research Center. Additional technical support in setting up the server technology and creating the underlying dataset was provided by Narges Ahmadnia, Avi Chawla, Owen Palcsik, Sarah Lindberg, Brooke Lundigran and Dr. Dana Rowangould with the University of Vermont Transportation Research Center.

Recommended Citation

Nelson, C., and Rowangould, G. (2024). CCRPC Transportation Sustainability Tracking Tool. University of Vermont Transportation Research Center. https://www.ccrpctranspstats.uvm.edu/