Transport Survey Methods

At the 2008 International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Annecy, France, transport survey methodologists and practitioners shared their experience with keeping abreast of the data needs of a rapidly changing world. Over the past decade, this has translated into the need for: an expanded travel survey toolkit; methodological innovation for surveys of freight and public transport operations; a growing use of data collection and processing technologies; a need to align surveys with other data streams; and an increased interest in the comparability of international datasets on personal travel and commodity movements in an era of globalisation. We discuss how these guided the choice and scope of the five themes around which both the Annecy Conference and this book were organised. The International Steering Committee for Travel Survey Conferences (ISCTSC) organises periodic international conferences on the survey methods that support planning, policy development, modelling and evaluation through the observation of person, vehicle and commodity movements at the urban, rural, regional, intercity and international scales. The evolution of the underlying issues, and the methodological response, can be seen in the series of publications that drew on previous conferences, most recently the 1997 Grainau Conference (Stopher & Jones, 2000), Transport Survey Methods Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISBN: 978-1-84855-844-1 the 2001 Kruger Conference (Stopher & Jones, 2003) and the 2004 Costa Rica Conference (Stopher & Stecher, 2006). That evolution includes: a gradual expansion of the travel survey toolkit beyond the needs of ‘core business’ urban area household travel surveys and national travel surveys; a growing recognition of the need for new approaches to collecting data on freight movements and public transport operations; an increasing expectation that data from transport user surveys should be aligned with other data streams from administrative and commercial sources; a growing application of digital technologies to aid data collection and processing; an increased attention to international (and within nation) comparisons of data on personal travel and commodity movements, and to international flows in the context of a progressive globalisation of national economies. With this in mind, the Transport Survey Methods Conference held in Annecy, France, in May 2008 was designed to continue the emphasis of previous meetings on transport survey quality and on the standards for assessing and maintaining quality (e.g. Stopher, Wilmot, Stecher, & Alsnih 2006), and also to look ahead to transport survey data harmonisation and comparability within and across countries. It was a concerted response to the evolving need to track and compare key policy measures and statistics, and their implications for sustaining mobility, in today’s global, interconnected world. For example, how can we track and compare long distance mobility in Belgium versus the United States when the two nations employ different definitions of a long distance trip? (Bonnel, Madre, & Armoogum, 2005) What does it mean that the mobility rate is around three trips per day in a Netherlands metropolitan area and around four trips per day in the Grenoble metropolitan area? Can we attribute this difference to policy measures in respective areas, true travel behaviour differences, different survey methodologies or different spatial boundary definitions? (Bonnel, 2003). As a community, transport survey researchers, practitioners and planners need advance knowledge of the components of survey and data collection design that are upstream from reliable and accurate intra-national and international comparisons. The topics of the Annecy Conference were intended to facilitate such discussions, and in a few cases to initiate them. It was also hoped that progress would be made towards the development of a framework for harmonising passenger transport survey data and statistics along the lines of what has been done for road freight data at European level (Pasi, 2008). At the same time, it was recognised that some classes of transport surveys are not yet ready for such a framework, and may require some fairly fundamental methodological research in the shorter term. Other classes — for example those that explore hypothetical travel behaviour under a range of possible future environmental pressures — are not intended to generate national statistics, but merit our attention for other sound reasons. The Annecy Conference thus sought a balance between the themes of data harmonisation and the data quality. With its workshop format, the conference continued the ISCTSC tradition to create an opportunity for networking, collaboration 4 Patrick Bonnel et al.