Chapter 18: Workshop Synthesis: Comparative Research into Travel Survey Methods

The historical evolution of survey methods has led to a wide array of protocols that are nowadays available for the transport sector. Technology implementations are in fact enabling a growing number of ways to collect data related to mobility behaviours. There is thus an emerging need to understand (1) which are the best ambits of use of each method and (2) how comparable are travel-related data that have been collected through different survey instruments.

Given the complexity and the extension of this topic, the workshop focused on some of the key issues at stake, also on the basis of the conference papers (Kagerbauer, Manz, & Zumkeller, 2013; Kohla & Meschik, 2013; Papon, 2013), that fuelled the initial discussion and that are reported in separate chapters of this book, with the added contribution of some of the workshop-associated papers (Diana, 2011; Hubrich & Wittwer, 2011; Moutou, Greves, & Puckett, 2011), whose main findings have been discussed as well during the sessions. In particular, workshop participants debated on the following aspects: