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TAC lays out participant matrix, recommends judgmental sampling and statewide recruitment for road‑charge pilot
Summary
Staff presented a 32‑cell sampling matrix to guide recruitment of pilot participants across vehicle classes, urban/rural residence, income levels, and region; the TAC favored a judgmental sampling approach with statewide recruitment and minimum subgroup targets rather than hard maximums.
The Technical Advisory Committee spent the morning developing a recruitment framework for the California Road Charge pilot, reviewing a staff‑built matrix that translates policy priorities (vehicle class, geography, income and operational concept) into recruiting targets.
Travis Dunn presented the matrix as a judgmental sampling tool that guarantees representation for subgroups of interest rather than relying on strictly proportional or purely random sampling. The staff proposal simplifies vehicle weight classes to three buckets (passenger/light trucks; medium trucks; heavy trucks) and uses a matrix of 32 subgroups for recruiting targets. Red placeholder numbers in the draft matrix are not recommendations but examples to be filled in during the TAC’s afternoon exercise.
Staff recommended statewide recruitment through a combination of channels: outreach by TAC members and the work group, the project website and social media, targeted contact via local governments and MPOs, and potential use of commercial account managers. Committee members suggested adding the DMV and county associations (CSAC) as distribution partners; staff said DMV is on the work group and registration‑insert options are being explored.
The TAC discussed definitions for urban/suburban versus rural/agricultural and income buckets. Staff presented three options for defining rural/urban (USDA census tract density; Census urban cluster/urbanized area with 2,500 persons per square mile threshold; and metropolitan statistical area), and recommended using census‑defined urbanized areas/urban clusters to preserve flexibility for county‑level recruitment. For income, staff recommended compressing HCD categories (extremely low, very low, low) into a single “low” bucket, median/moderate to “medium,” and above moderate to “high.”
On heavy trucks, staff proposed fleet‑size buckets (fewer than 50 trucks, 50–999, 1,000+), and committee members asked that the consultants and industry representatives refine those thresholds because fleet structure, domiciling, and operation types vary widely. Participants also favored letting volunteers choose an operational concept (odometer, time permit, GPS/mileage) at signup while setting minimum sample targets for each concept to ensure evaluable comparisons.
Staff noted recruitment would be dynamic: the TAC can set minimums and open statewide recruitment if some subgroups under‑perform in early outreach. The TAC scheduled an interactive afternoon session to populate the matrix with numeric targets and set minimums for households, age, gender and special vehicle classes.
