Household travel surveys: Where are we going?

1996

^ I ^his paper focuses on how U.S. household travel surveys are executed and how they will I be executed in the future. Many cultural and contextual factors result in marked diffcrences between household travel surveys in the United States and those conducted in other countries. It is not the intent of this paper to deal with these differences nor to provide an overview of household travel surveys in other countries. However, the problems currently experienced in the United States may be a decade or two away for other countries; therefore, the information in this paper may be useful to survey developers abroad. This paper examines where we are in the development of household travel surveys, what forces have shaped travel surveys being conducted today, and what changes will affect the evolution of household travel surveys The paper is intended to raise challenges about the concepts that will transport household travel surveys into the next century.

2003

Household travel surveys continue to be a mainstay of transport planning and modelling efforts. With rising costs of many surveys, and the critical need for good quality data, questions are raised with increasing frequency on how best to obtain a quality survey that also provides comparable data to other household travel surveys. To try to provide some useful answers to these questions, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program sponsored a research project to develop and recommend standards for household travel surveys that would assist in maintaining a minimum standard of quality in such surveys and that would lead to greater comparability across surveys. In this paper, the state of practice with respect to specifying standards for surveys in general is reviewed. Standards for household travel surveys are found to be non-existent, while those for any type of social survey are found to be uncommon, and to deal with only a few aspects of surveys. In this research effort, over sixty possible areas for standards have been identified, of which more than forty are expected to be developed before the research is complete. This paper describes the results of work on about fourteen of these areas of standards and guidance. A number of proposed standards are outlined, including details of the analysis that, in some instances, has led to the proposals. These proposals have been developed in the North American context, but may also offer potential for other countries, especially in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The standards are also intended to be helpful to those who are responsible for developing requests for proposals to undertake household travel surveys, but who lack the level of knowledge and experience to be certain what to request. A number of potential standards are discussed in the paper. The first ones have to do with the initial design phases of a survey, including when a pilot survey or pretest should be done, how to determine a sample size for a pretest or pilot survey, and what is involved in comparing alternative designs within a pilot survey. The second area concerns the instrument design, and addresses such areas as the core set of questions that should be included in any household travel survey, standardising the categories for answers, and developing standard question wordings for certain questions, such as income. A third area includes issues such as the time of day to begin and end a survey, how to report time of day, how to handle answering machines and repeated requests for call backs, reducing incorrect reporting of non-mobility, proxy reporting, and specifications concerning mailing materials. The final area considered in this paper is that of coding of survey results, including missing values, coding complex variables like activities, and computing response rates. Illustrations are provided, where possible, of the consequences of not having standards and the difficulties and loss of quality that have arisen in

ABSTRACT Household travel surveys remainan essential componentof transport planning and modelling efforts. However, with rising costs of many surveys, and the critical need for goodquality data,how best to obtain a quality survey that also provides comparable data to other household travel surveys,is a question that constantly arises. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program sponsored a research project to develop and recommend,standards for household travel surveys . The purpose of this research is toassist in maintaining a minimum,standard ofquality in household travel surveys and thuslead to greater comparability across surveys. This paper reviews t he state of practice with respect to specifying standards for surveys in general. Standards for household travel surveys are found to be non-existent, while those for any type of social survey are found to be uncommon, and deal with only a few aspects of surveys. In this research effort, over sixty possible areas for standard...

Although an extensive literature is available concerning the design of travel surveys, fewer research initiatives have been carried out to determine the content of the survey itself. The objective of the present work is to identify such minimum set through a survey (MTSQ-Mini-Travel Survey Questionnaire) targeted to experts in this field. Moreover, it is investigated whether unanimity exists in the experts' opinions concerning the importance of various types of questions and whether regional and/or professional differences exist. The MTSQ survey was successfully completed by 81 respondents in October-November 2012, mainly from Europe and North America. The study identified the most important questions, which should form the core of any NHTS. This list is especially useful for countries which do not yet have implemented a NHTS, and for defining the set of questions in case a harmonized household travel survey spanning across different countries will be initialized. Secondly, the paper investigated whether unanimity exists in the experts' opinions. Our analyses clearly pinpointed different evaluations according to the experts' characteristics, thus it could be concluded that unanimity is certainly not complete. Thus, whenever developing standards for travel surveys these differences should be taken into account, according to both the prospective data users the intended data usages. Especially the differences with respect to the regional context (North-American versus European), and involvement with the NHTS should be acknowledged.

2014

Although an extensive literature is available concerning the design of travel surveys, fewer research initiatives have been carried out to determine the content of the survey itself. The objective of the present work is to identify such minimum set through a survey (MTSQ-Mini-Travel Survey Questionnaire) targeted to experts in this field. Moreover, it is investigated whether unanimity exists in the experts' opinions concerning the importance of various types of questions and whether regional and/or professional differences exist. The MTSQ survey was successfully completed by 81 respondents in October-November 2012, mainly from Europe and North America. The study identified the most important questions, which should form the core of any NHTS. This list is especially useful for countries which do not yet have implemented a NHTS, and for defining the set of questions in case a harmonized household travel survey spanning across different countries will be initialized. Secondly, the paper investigated whether unanimity exists in the experts' opinions. Our analyses clearly pinpointed different evaluations according to the experts' characteristics, thus it could be concluded that unanimity is certainly not complete. Thus, whenever developing standards for travel surveys these differences should be taken into account, according to both the prospective data users the intended data usages. Especially the differences with respect to the regional context (North-American versus European), and involvement with the NHTS should be acknowledged.

Most current transportation planning models use data collected in household travel/activity surveys. Because data from complete households are desired, survey protocols allow for proxy reports when individuals are unable or unwilling to personally participate in interviews. However, if proxy reports are different from self reports, and if the proportion of proxy respondents is large, or concentrated in particular sociodemogrpahic groups, then the travel estimates based on these data may be biased. This paper examines the demographic characteristics of adult proxy respondents in the add-on samples of the National Household Travel Survey, 2001 conducted in Lancaster, PA, Baltimore, Des Moines, and Kentucky and compares mean trip rates of self and proxy respondents who report at least one trip on the travel day. The results indicate that men, younger adults (age 18-24), those with less than a high-school education, and those with high household incomes are more likely to report by prox...

2002

A method has been developed to synthesize household travel survey data from a combination of Census and national transport survey data sources. The procedure, described in other papers, involves creating distributions of pertinent variables (numbers of trips by purpose, mode of travel, time of day of travel, and trip length) that can be used to estimate travel-demand models. A sample of local residents is then drawn from disaggregate census data, providing detailed information on the socioeconomic characteristics of the sample. Using these socioeconomic characteristics, travel data are simulated from the transport data distributions using Monte Carlo simulation. This procedure was developed in the United States in the past four years. The paper describes the application of this procedure to Adelaide, South Australia, for which an actual household travel survey exists from 1999. The paper describes results obtained from applying the generic data as the basis of the simulation. Results are compared between the synthetic and real data to determine the closeness of the match between the data sets. The procedure uses data derived from a nationwide travel survey in the U.S., but uses census data for Adelaide from the 1996 ABS Census, using the one percent sample. The purpose of this research was to determine the extent to which the trip characteristics distributions from the U.S. could be used in Australia. It is concluded that the procedure performs about as well as the process was shown to perform in Dallas, Salt Lake City, and Baton Rouge in the U.S. This process holds out considerable promise as a means to increase available samples for local and corridor planning, as well as to provide data for regions that have typically not been able to undertake household travel surveys on the scale of those being conducted in the Melbourne and Sydney regions.

2010

For the past decade, GPS devices have been used increasingly as a means to validate household travel surveys and more recently as a means to determine response to travel behaviour change policies. However, although several papers have put forward arguments that GPS is now ready to be used as a potential substitute for conventional travel surveys, there has been somewhat of a reluctance to proceed in this direction. This paper describes such an effort. In late 2008, a team of consultants was put under contract by the Ohio Department of Transportation to conduct a GPS survey of households in the Greater Cincinnati area of southwest Ohio, northwest Kentucky, and southeast Indiana. A pilot survey was conducted in March-April 2009, and this paper reports on the outcome of that pilot study. At the time of writing this paper, the main study is underway, with a goal of having at least 3,000 households use GPS devices for a three-day period within the 12 months from mid-August 2009 to mid-August 2010. In this paper, the procedures for recruitment of households, delivery and collection of GPS devices, and the rates of completion of the survey are described. A prompted recall survey, using a web-based survey is also described. The purpose of the web-based prompted recall survey is to collect sufficient data to allow improvement and addition to existing processing software, so that the GPS data will provide sufficient information to allow travel demand models to be estimated, as well as informing various policy issues. Preliminary results from the pilot survey indicate some issues with completion of the GPS task and also with the prompted recall survey. These issues have suggested the use of variable incentives in the main survey to improve overall response levels and significant changes to the prompted recall survey, which have been implemented. Statistics are also provided on some of the sociodemographic characteristics of the pilot sample, and this is compared to Census data for the Greater Cincinnati area. However, it was not expected or intended that the pilot sample would be a representative sample of the population. Preliminary analysis of the data collected by GPS indicates a substantially higher rate of trip-making than has been measured in the past, using conventional diary methods. While this latter result was expected, the magnitude of the increase is larger than expected.

Transportation Research Record, 1995

There exists a tremendous variety in the structure and form of instruments to collect household travel data. The basis for most instruments was the in-home interview used in the 1950s and 1960s Current instruments reflect changes in data collection methods, from in-home to mailhack or telephone retrieval. The amount and type of information desired to be collected have also