2: Household Travel Surveys: Proposed Standards and Guidelines

Household travel surveys continue to be an essential component of transport planning and modelling efforts. However, with rising costs of many surveys, and the critical need for good quality data, how best to obtain a quality survey that also provides comparable data to other household travel surveys is a question that constantly arises. Standards for household travel surveys are non-existent, while those for any type of social survey are uncommon, and deal with only a few aspects of surveys.

A number of potential standards are discussed in this chapter. This chapter is divided into seven sections. The first looks at the design of survey instruments; the second is concerned with the design of data collection procedures; the third looks at pilot surveys and pretests; the fourth looks at survey implementation; the fifth is concerned with data coding and geo-coding; the sixth deals with data analysis and expansion; and the final section is concerned with the assessment of data quality.