34: Data Collection Related to Emergency Events

Travel surveys have concentrated primarily on urban person movement in the past. Interest is currently growing in freight travel demand, while long distance travel received a resurgence of interest in the United States with the introduction of the American Travel Survey in 1996, after the last large-scale long distance survey – the National Travel Survey – was conducted in 1977. Interest in continuing to provide data on long distance travel has been demonstrated by the collection of long distance travel in the 2001 National Household Travel Survey. However, while it is apparent that there is a diversification in the type of data being collected, there is a growing need to collect data on emergency-related events, and yet this seems to have received little attention in the past. For example, have data been collected on the travel related to the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, the wildfires of California in 2003, or even the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001? We need to know how people behave in terms of travel during an emergency in order to be able to model that behaviour and develop contingency plans for the future.