Prelims

Prelims

Title Page

Travel Survey Methods

Quality and Future Directions

Edited by

Peter Stopher

The University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

and

Cheryl Stecher

Franklin Hill Group, Santa Monica, USA

United Kingdom — North America — Japan

India — Malaysia — China

Copyright Page

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

Copyright © 2006 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-08-046401-5

Foreword

This book is a new chapter in the ISCTSC’s continuing focus on maintaining and improving the quality of data collection in transport surveys. The papers extend discourse on broad topic areas that have been addressed by the ISCTSC in previous gatherings, update us on travel survey initiatives currently under way in many countries, and provide a glimpse into the future in the form of changing contexts, new topics, new technologies, and new standards. However, what these papers really tell us is that there are many ways to improve the quality of transport surveys; too many to be covered in a single book or conference proceedings. There is no set of absolute standards that, if observed, will automatically ensure the quality of a particular research effort or product. However, there are general (and generally measurable) guidelines for high-quality research that are widely appreciated in the ISCTSC community and beyond.

As we pick up the baton as ISCTSC chairs, reading this book reminds us of the importance of the fundamentals of good survey design. No survey fully satisfies the theoretical ideals of scientific inquiry. Every survey represents a collection of compromises between the ideal and the possible. For us, the primary goal of the ISCTSC is to help the international community of transport survey researchers arrive at the best possible compromises by facilitating communication among those conducting transport survey research, opening new lines of communication with those conducting related research in different disciplines, and extending information dissemination about survey practice and methods research. Perfect transport surveys may never be possible, but good surveys can and should be done.

We would like to thank the authors who participated in this volume, particularly those of you who are long-standing contributors to ISCTSC programs. We look forward to working with you over the next several years and commit to stimulating and expanding the ISCTSC roles in collaboration and dissemination. We would particularly like to acknowledge the solid foundation that has been provided for our upcoming tenure by Peter Stopher, Cheryl Stecher, and Peter Jones, and all the Chairpersons of the previous International Conferences on Transport Survey Methods. We would also like to thank Chester Wilmot for his unwavering behind-the-scenes support as Secretary/Treasurer of ISCTSC. We thank them for their diligence in support of the goal of transport survey quality, and hope to carry on that tradition.

Johanna Zmud

Tony Richardson

Preface

It is hoped that this book will move the practice of Travel Surveys forward again, as a follow on to the earlier book Transport Survey Quality and Innovation (Stopher and Jones, 2003a), published three years ago. It is the goal of this book to make further progress in establishing ways in which the quality of transport surveys can be assessed and improved, as well as to set out some future directions for research in improving travel survey methods. Since the earlier book was published, a significant research effort has drawn to its conclusion, sponsored by the US National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP), through the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in the US. This research effort was aimed at establishing standardised procedures for personal travel surveys in the US, and the work accomplished in that research forms the basis of the second chapter of this book, which was also used as a keynote paper in the 7^th International Conference on Travel Survey Methods, held in Costa Rica in August 2004.

This book is not a conference proceedings. However, the various chapters of the book have been developed from papers that were a part of the 7^th International Conference on Travel Survey Methods. All of the papers written for and as a consequence of the conference were reviewed by three referees. Only those papers that achieved the highest ratings from the referees were selected for inclusion in this book. Prior to the conference, a call for abstracts yielded a total of more than forty abstracts. Following a review of all the abstracts, twenty three papers were eventually selected for inclusion in the conference. Seventeen resource papers were commissioned. Following review of these and modification by the authors, sixteen were included in the conference. Three keynote papers were also commissioned, and all three were included in the conference, following extensive reviews of each. Thus, in the conference itself, forty two papers were presented either to plenary sessions or to workshops. Of these, twenty two were selected for revision and inclusion in this book. In addition, the chairs of the fifteen workshops were asked to write papers that summarised the deliberations of those workshops and that could be included as chapters of this book. These papers were also reviewed before being included. Final versions of most of the chapters were completed in May-June of 2005, almost a year after the conference was held.

Acknowledgements

The chapters in this book were originally prepared either for or as a result of a conference that was held in Costa Rica in August 2004. That conference was conceived and directed by the ISCTSC, under the co-chairmanship of Cheryl Stecher and Peter Stopher. The ISCTSC was set up in 1997 to ‘…organise periodic international conferences dealing with research subjects relevant to the conduct of transport surveys that support planning, policy, modelling, monitoring, and related issues for urban, rural, regional, intercity, and international person, vehicle, and commodity movements’. The ISCTSC was assisted in organising the local arrangements and logistics by a Local Organising Committee in the US and Costa Rica, under the co-chairmanship of Carlos Arce and Carlos Contreras Montoya. The conference co-chairs would like to acknowledge the hard work put in by these two committees, the members of which are shown in Tables 1 and 2.

We would also like to acknowledge the workshop chairs and rapporteurs, who contributed substantially to the success of the conference as well as contributing to chapters in this book and to the refereeing process for various chapters. We would also like to acknowledge Andrea Hernandez Torres and Adriana Hernandez Torres of the University of Costa Rica and Olman Vargas Benavides and Samanta Solorio Murillo of the Colegio Federado de Ingenieros y Arquitectos who assisted the LOC and staffed the conference registration desk throughout the conference.

We are also grateful to the following organisations that provided financial support and sponsorships for the conference, without which this book would not exist:

• The US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration;

• AVV Transport Research Centre, Dutch Ministry of Transport;

• NuStats of Texas;

• Ministerio de Obras Publicas y Transporte, Costa Rica;

• Colegio Federado de Ingenieros y Arquitectos, Costa Rica;

• Morpace, Inc. of Michigan;

• Resource Systems Group, Inc. of Vermont; and

• Eurobus, S.A. of Costa Rica.

The sponsorship of these organisations enabled a number of scholarships to be awarded to delegates, primarily from South and Central America, but also to Africa, the latter also using funds that were generated by the previous conference held in South Africa in 2000. None of these delegates would have been able to attend without this assistance. Their presence in the conference enriched the conference discussions greatly, and has also contributed to the dissemination of good practice in travel surveys in a number of countries.

We would also like to acknowledge the assistance provided by Carmen Stopher in reading and checking the manuscript for this book. Her help has been invaluable. We would also like to thank the publishers, Elsevier Science, and especially Chris Pringle, for their encouragement and support of this venture.

Dedication - Patricia van der Reis

This book is dedicated to the memory of Patricia van der Reis, who died unexpectedly in October 2005. Pat had been associated with the International Travel Survey Conferences for more than twenty years. During this time, she made major contributions to the profession, as well as providing strong representation of the African subcontinent in this international setting. In the Second International Conference on New Survey Methods, held at Hungerford Hill in Australia in September 1983, Pat contributed a chapter on ‘The transferability of rating scale techniques to transport research in a developing country’¹, which drew the attention of the conference delegates to special issues in asking people in Africa to use rating scales to assess aspects of transport service. At the Third International Conference on Survey Methods in Transportation, held in Washington, D.C. in January 1990, Pat chaired one of the workshops on the topic of New Technologies in Surveys, where the primary new technologies seen then as applying to transport surveys were lap-top computers, use of computer assisted telephone interviewing, audio and video taping, and the potential for obtaining data from vehicle on-board computers.

The next in this series of conferences that Pat attended was the Fifth International Conference that was held in Eibsee, Germany in May, 1997. In this conference, Pat presented a landmark paper on issues of illiteracy and semi-literacy in travel surveys², as well as contributing to the two workshops she attended during the conference. When it became apparent that there would be further conferences in this series, Pat proposed that the next conference should be held on the African continent and volunteered herself as the chair of the Local Organising Committee. Over the next three years, she worked tirelessly to ensure that the conference that would be held in 2001 in the Kruger Park in South Africa would be an even greater success than its predecessors. She formed a Local Organising Committee, helped obtain local sponsorship funds, organised the location of the conference, and assisted in a vast number of ways to ensure that conference participants would have a rewarding and also enjoyable conference. For many of those who attended, this was their first visit to Africa, and Pat made it a memorable one for all those who attended. She also worked extremely hard to ensure that various professionals from all over sub-Saharan Africa would have an opportunity to attend the conference. She did this both by finding ways to publicise the conference and also in helping to find funds that could be used to provide scholarships for those who would otherwise be unable to attend. In total, of 106 delegates to the conference, forty one were from thirteen African countries, with the remaining delegates coming from Europe, the US, Australia, Japan, and South America. This afforded these African delegates an opportunity to interact with an international group that they would rarely have the opportunity to meet. Pat also arranged for a keynote address from a prominent survey specialist in Africa, which added immeasurably to the success of the conference and to setting an appropriate stage for the balance of the conference. Notwithstanding all of the work involved in organising the conference, Pat still found the time to contribute, with her friend and colleague Marina Lombard, an important resource paper on multi-cultural and multi-language transport surveys³. Pat took part in the deliberations of the two series of workshops, while also continuing to ensure that the conference ran smoothly and that all delegates’ needs were met.

After the conference was over, it was decided by the International Steering Committee to purchase fifty copies of the resulting conference book and to distribute these to delegates and universities in sub-Saharan Africa. Again, Pat provided addresses of many universities in Africa, to which books were subsequently sent, as well as ensuring that all delegates from Africa received a copy of the book.

The next conference in the series was held in Costa Rica. Pat assisted from the outset, first by documenting carefully what she had done as Local Organising Committee chair and sharing this with the incoming Local Organising Committee chair, and then in accepting a role as a workshop chair of the workshop on Survey Implementation Standards and Guidelines. In her inimitable fashion, she was one of the first workshop chairs to submit her workshop report, which appears as a chapter in this book⁴, as well as getting reviews done promptly of the papers in her workshop and providing recommendations to the editors.

Pat will be remembered by the many international delegates to these various conferences as a gentle, self-effacing, and highly professional contributor. She showed remarkable ability in the area of travel survey design and implementation and led the way in innovations to allow such surveys to be done in the very different contexts to be found in Africa, from where most travel survey techniques have been developed in Western Europe and North America. Pat contributed in more ways than most of us are probably aware, not only in innovation in travel surveys, but also in championing the development of her fellow Africans and assisting the international community of transport and travel survey professionals.

On a personal note, I had the privilege to work with Pat in the organising of the past three conferences. I came to depend upon her in many ways. She was always responsive, providing replies to questions and solutions to problems more rapidly than any of us had a right to expect. She was extraordinarily diligent in all that she took on to do, and was always cheerful in the execution of whatever task was before her. I also had the pleasure of getting to know Pat personally, and enjoyed enormously a trek into Kruger Park with Pat and her husband Gunther, where we saw many fabulous sightings of African wildlife. We also spent pleasant African evenings talking in the moonlight, and planning the conference, and talking of other matters of mutual interest.

Pat’s presence in and contribution to her profession and to these conferences will be greatly missed.

Peter Stopher

Sydney, Australia