State transportation officials believe more than 59,000 government-funded transportation survey invitations mailed out last month failed to reach Oahu residents’ mailboxes until after the deadline printed on the invitations for residents to participate.

Brian Gibson, executive director of the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, urged residents who just received invitations to join in the Oahu Household Travel Survey to ignore the deadline shown on the letter, and go online to respond anyway.

Potential survey participants are now being asked to respond within two weeks of receiving the invitation letter, he said.

The survey is part of a $1 million effort to gather data on Oahu residents’ local travel habits, and to plug that information into a computer model used to help plan state and county road and highway improvements.

"The problem is that the printer who is sending out the letters is sending them by bulk mail from the mainland, so it’s coming by boat," Gibson said. That slow-motion mail delivery caused survey invitation letters to arrive a week or more after the deadlines printed on the invitations, he said.

The deadline for one batch was Oct. 31, but the deadline for the second batch was unclear.

Gibson said he believes all of the survey letters sent out so far arrived late, but said that won’t affect the computer modeling project. The contractor is required to gather 4,000 completed surveys, so it will be up to the contractor to mail out as many invitations as it takes to get the job done.

The Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization contracted with Parsons Brinckerhoff for the project, which in turn subcontracted with the Austin, Texas-based PTV NuStats LLC to handle the survey. The survey component of the project will cost $653,000, Gibson said.

The Honolulu-based firm OmniTrak will call Oahu households who respond to the invitation letters for a preliminary interview about how, when, where and why they travel. Some of those households will then be chosen to fill out travel diaries for each household member detailing everywhere they went on a specific date, and how they got there.

Data from that travel snapshot will then be plugged into the computer model to help the city and the state Department of Transportation plan for road and highway improvements in the years ahead.

From now on the survey invitations will not list specific deadlines for participation, Gibson said. Instead, the new invitations will urge residents to go online to register to participate in the survey within a week or so after receiving the invitation.

This is the first time the Oahu Metropolitan Planning Organization has surveyed residents about their travel habits since the mid-1990s, Gibson said. The survey will continue into next spring.