The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG) is the metropolitan planning organization for the Phoenix metropolitan area. In collaboration with the City of Phoenix, City of Mesa, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, MAG has undertaken a comprehensive airport data collection effort to support an update of its airport ground access sub-model.

This paper describes the expansion procedure that was undertaken to weight the air passenger survey data and provides descriptive statistics on the final weighted survey data. After the surveys were collected, cleaned and processed, the data was expanded to represent the average population of daily air passengers who access/egress each of the two Phoenix airports. Much effort has been placed in developing advanced weighting procedures for regional and national household travel surveys that rely on ACS and other available demographic data to use as control totals. However, for an airport survey the control totals are not as readily available and the expansion procedure differs substantially from a household travel survey.

The completed air passenger surveys are a set of random samples of air passengers at terminal departure locations, plus mode oversamples from rental car, long-term parking lot, and LRT shuttle intercept surveys. Data on flight operations and enplanement statistics from the airports and BTS 10 percent ticket sample data was used to develop expansion targets along five strata: airport, day-of-week, time-of-day, terminal, and final destination. Final expansion values were calculated by additionally weighting the expansion targets by party size and controlling, by mode and time-of-day, for the oversample data collected at shuttle lots.