TRAVEL SURVEYS

Travel surveys will continue to be one of the most important ways of obtaining the critical information needed for transportation planning and decision making in the new millennium. In the last half century, travel survey methods have undergone tremendous change. Originally, travel surveys were conducted primarily through face-to-face interviews, typically conducted in respondents' homes or at intercept points along major roadways and transit routes or at major transportation nodes. Significant changes in modern urban lifestyles, however, made the large-scale use of traditional face-to-face survey methods extremely costly. Current state-of-the-art household travel surveys rely extensively on the use of mail and telephone to obtain information on the daily travel and other activities of a representative sample of the population. The biggest problem faced in conducting high-quality travel surveys today is nonparticipation. The basic conflict between the need for increasingly detailed and frequent data on daily travel patterns and the growing difficulty in contacting and interviewing persons about their travel will require continued improvements in travel survey methods. This paper discusses some of the likely improvements.

• Record URL:
  • http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/millennium/00135.pdf
• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper is available on the CD-ROM, Transportation in the New Millennium: State of the Art and Future Directions, Perspectives from Transportation Research Board Standing Committees. It is also available on the TRB Website. Distribution, posting, or copying of this PDF is strictly prohibited without written permission of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. Unless otherwise indicated, all materials in this PDF are copyrighted by the National Academy of Sciences. Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  A3B05: Committee on Safety Data, Analysis, and Evaluation
  Washington, DC  United States  20418
• Authors:
  • Griffiths, R
  • Richardson, A J
  • LEE-GOSSELIN, MEH
• Publication Date: 2000

Language

• English

Media Info

• Pagination: 7 p.
• Serial:
  • Transportation in the New Millennium
  • Publisher: Transportation Research Board

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Data collection; Forecasting; Future; Interviewing; Postal service; State of the art; Telephone; Transportation planning; Travel behavior; Travel patterns; Travel surveys
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00783803
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Feb 24 2000 12:00AM