MoDOT University of Missouri Outreach and Extension OSEDA
MO Department of Transportation - Census of Tranportation Planning Package Data Resource

HELP Page for

MoDOT CTPP 2000 Data Access Application

Overview

This application allows the user to retrieve tabular information from the 2000 Census of Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) about a specific geographic area or series of areas (such as counties, census tracts, MPO's, etc.) in a specified format or formats. You can, for example, generate a complete set of standard profile tables for a single MoDOT planning district, or for all census tracts within a specified planning district. You tell the application what you want to see by making choices on the selection menus which comprise most of the front-end web page. This document provides detailed descriptions of what sorts of selections you can make and what kind of results you can expect.

The form is divided into 3 major sections.

Once you have filled in each of the options you click on the "Run Request" button at the bottom of the page in order to initiate processing of your request (query). In most cases the next thing you will see is a short summary of the results, ending with hyperlinks to the actual output files. You then select (click on) those output files to retrieve your results. If there is a problem with your choices you will usually be presented with an error message indicating the nature of the problem and asked to try again. You can always use your browser's back key to return to the main (form fillout) page, where all your choices will be just as you last specified them. You can then make adjustments to your choices before hitting the "Run Request" button again.

Note that most of the selections come with a default value, so that if you do not do anything with regard to that choice the program assumes an answer. For example, if you do not do anything with the first drop-down menu regarding geographic universe, then the default value is the one shown - "Entire MoDOT Universe.." . The only exception to this general rule is the second selection menu in Part I - the kind of geographu unit. You MUST make a choice here. If you doubt this, just try loading the menu page and then going to the bottom and clicking on "Run Request".

The Menu Items (Parameters)

Part I: REQUIRED options: the geographic area (universe) and the summary units.

Select the geographic area of interest

Here you specify that you want to limit your query to a specified geographic area or areas. The default value is to impose no restrictions, to take all of the specified geographic units. You can make the choice to limit your request to the state of Missouri (thus excluding any data for the Kansas portion of the Kansas City MPO and the Illinois portion of the St. Louis MPO). A very common choice for this parameter would be one of the administrative units. For example, if you wanted data only for a single MoDOT Planning District you would choose the "One or more MoDOT Planning Districts" option. You would then specify the specific district of interest by selecting it from the MoDOT District selection list in Part II. Of couse, since the choice indicate one or more you could select more than one planning district in Part II. The most important thing to watch for here is that whenever you choose a "One or more ..." choice here, you need to be sure and specify which ones on the corresponding Part II selection list.

The name of this paramenter is universe and the default value is also "universe" (without the quotes).

Select the kind of geographic units for which you want to see data

This is the only menu choice that you must select a value for. If you fail to specify the units your query will not run. What you are specifying here is the kind or level of the data you wish to see. The application will only retrieve data for one kind of geography. The menu here shows you what those kinds are (i.e. County, 2000 Census Tract, etc.) If you need data for more than one kind of unit, then will need to run more than one query. As noted on the page, by default, you will get data for ALL the units of the kind specified which fall totally or partially within the specified universe. For some unit types (all accept tract, bg and place) you can select specific (rather than all) units you want to see from the selection lists in Part II. You can choose the same kind of geographic entity for both the universe and the units, in which case you will get data for those units and nothing smaller. For example, I can choose "One or more MPO's" as the universe type, and MPO as the geographic unit. This means I will get data summarized at the MPO level for all MPO's selected in Part II (which by default would be all MPO's.

The MPO/State selection only makes sense if you choose the St. Louis (East West Gateway) or Kansas City (MARC) MPO's. These units do not exist anywhwere else in the state. If you select these as your units then (and only then) you can use the States menu in Part II to specify which state portions you are interested in.

The name of this paramenter is units and it has no default value.

Part II: Select Geographic Area(s) to Be Used As Universe or Summary Units

If you specified the area of interest as "One or more ..." administrative units (in Part I, above), then specify which one (or more) on the appropriate select menu, below. Similarly, if you specified one of these entities as your summary unit then you can select which specific ones you are interested in. Note that the State selection menu is ignored unless you specified "MPO/State" as your unit of interest. Note also that which of these menus is relevant (i.e. for which ones will the application even look at what you chose) depends on what you specified in Part I. If, for example, you chose a specific MoDOT Planning District from the menu here in Part II, but you did not specify either "One or more planning districts" for universe or Planning Districts for units, then the application would not even look at anything you specified on the Planning District select menu.

Typically, only one menu is relevant, except when selecting specific state portions of MPO's (when you would make choices from both the MPO and State menus). While it would be possible to specify a specific administrative region such as an RPC or Planning District as the universe, County as the unit, and then make selections for both the districts and counties menus, we would not recommend doing so. Easier to just specify your Universe as one or more counties, your unit as county and then just make selections off the county select menu in Part II.

The names of the paramenters corresponding to these five selection lists are mpo, dot, rpc, county, state and each has a default value of ALL. These are all multi-value select lists so the parameter specification is repeated for each item selected.

Part III: Choose Table(s) and Kind(s) of Output

Select the Demographic Table(s) of Interest

A simple selection here to indicate the data tables of interest. There are 25 of them and the default choice is that you get all of it. This is usually OK if you are requesting output as a SAS dataset or an HTML report product, but it can cause problems with csv format (comma delimited files, typically intended for loading into a spreadsheet). Excel and other spreadsheets have limit on the number of columns they will allow in a spreadsheet (255), so if you make a choice here that translates into more than 255 data items and then try to load that into a spreadsheet via a csv file, you will get a warning message indicating that "Not all data can be loaded". In such cases you will need to break down your request into a few tables at a time.

Note the hyperlinks located just below the select list ("See metadata for..."). You might want to right click on one of these and choose the "Open in new window" option so that you can view the table definition metadata at the same time you are making your table selections from the Tables select list.

Specify the Kind(s) of Output You Would Like

The csv file output choice is usually what you want when you plan to import the data into a spreadsheet or maybe when wanting to convert to Access or dbf formats. Beware, however, that we use some rather long variable names - up to 16 characters - and that some database formats, such as dbf, do not allow names this long. There is also the above mentioned limit on the number of columns that spreadsheets will handle. There are also limits on the number of rows. So when requesting csv output you may want to break down your request into a series of smaller ones so that the results will fit.

The SAS dataset output choice requires that you first download and install the SAS Viewer application on your Windows system. Configure your browser to have this program serve as a helper application for files with a filetype of "sas7bdat" (this normally is taken care of automatically during the install of the viewer software). We have had mixed results in getting the application to directly open for viewing the dataset. But if this does not work you can always save the file to your desktop and then open it locally with the SAS viewer program. SAS Viewer is a rather full featured utility that lets you get a quick view of the data. It has features that allow you to select rows and cells that can be copied and pasted into other desktop applications such as Excel.

Of course if you have SAS software on your PC you can also open the downloaded file directly from SAS.

The HTML formatted report choice will get you a nicely formatted report that displays the variables in an easy to read format and with easy to use hyperlinks to metadata. It is especially useful when you have selected Both yrs merged as the Time parameter, since this will cause the application to generate a trend report.


Return to MoDOT CTPP 2000 Data Access Application.


Have a question or a comment? Contact:

Lance R. Huntley, OSEDA HuntleyL@umsystem.edu
Ernie Perry, MoDOT perrye1@mail.modot.state.mo.us