15: Quality Assessment

The issue of quality and standards was identified as a key theme of the 2001 conference. In their report on that conference, Stopher and Jones (2003a) concluded that more work remained to be done and the issue reappeared as the focus for some of the workshops in the 2004 conference. This chapter is offered as background for this continuing discussion. The conference organisers drew on the conclusions from the previous conference in proposing that the discussions should focus on:

For the purposes of this chapter, I think it appropriate to start by summarising the debate thus far.

In their keynote paper to the 2001 conference, Stopher and Jones (2003b) suggest that, in the absence of agreed standards, many sponsoring agencies are unable to make an informed selection between competing survey contractors or to assess the quality of the delivered product, that many of the contractors do not themselves know if they are doing a good job and, given the lack of standardisation, that the users of survey data often find it impossible to compare results obtained from different surveys. They lament that, given an annual worldwide expenditure on travel surveys exceeding US$50m, ‘… there is no agreement within the transport profession as to what constitutes a good survey’. They suggest that the absence of appropriate standards is compromising the reliability, usefulness, cost-effectiveness, comparability, clarity, and completeness of travel surveys.