37: Public Use of Travel Surveys: The Metadata Perspective

The discussions at the 1997 Eibsee conference (Stopher and Jones, 2000; Axhausen, 2000) highlighted the need to improve the documentation, access to, and archiving of transport data, in particular travel behaviour data. Discussions at other venues, for example the meetings of the International Association of Travel Behaviour Research and of the relevant Transportation Research Board committees, have come to the same conclusion. The action list implicit in those discussions had and has the following points:

Unfortunately, during the past four years, the response to these action points has been rather muted within the transport policy and research community. Progress has been made, but mostly where individuals were willing to act. The range of activities mentioned has not yet been embraced as part of obvious and normal professional practise.