Dr. Brown's work this week on Commuter data

This week I was doing some work to assist Matt Alden in his project - estimating how many miles commuted by faculty/students/staff.

Matt's first (and most direct attempt) was to obtain records from Transportation services as to who has parking hang tags - this seemed to be the most direct way of learning who is driving to campus. Those data are only available as hardcopy data - about 18,000 pieces of paper - that no one has time to type in manually.

The next step was Matt talking to someone in Institutional Research to track down zip codes associated with each faculty/staff person. The idea was that Matt would use zip code data to estimate driving distance. They told Matt they don't have zip code data.

Wed 31 Oct I visited the Institutional Research office and they provided data from the OU factbook that has a distribution of #s of students from each county of Ohio. In addition there is a list of # of students from the other 49 states, as well as a tally of international students.

Fri 2 Nov I visited Carlotta Hensler (hensler@ohio.edu) in the Human Resources office to ask for fac/staff zip code data by year. She agreed that it would be a simple request and that these data would be provided by the HR analyst Steve Madden (maddens@ohio.edu).
These data should be emailed on Monday 5 Nov. --KJB