By John Ostapkovich

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is looking for 10,000 people to each play a small role in a travel survey.

This is not about travel as in jetting off to Cancun, but in where you and I might go and how we’d get there on a single day. Chris Puchalsky, the Commission’s associate director of systems planning, says it’s not being done all at once.

“We want to get seasonal variation so we know you don’t always make the same kinds of trips during the summer as you do during the school year,” Puchalsky says. “So that’s why we’re doing the survey for a full 12 months, so we’re spreading those 10-thousand people out over a whole year even though each person is only asked to record one day of travel behavior.”

Puchalsky says the survey, the first since 2000, will allow a look at travel patterns that have probably changed considerably since online shopping, walking, biking, transit use and working from home are all more popular now. 

He says transportation dollars are tight and the survey is a way of prioritizing what needs to be built or fixed.