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Across Europe, on average more than 95% of all passenger cars and half of all light commercial vehicles are permanently available to a household. This includes both privately owned vehicles and company cars. The profiles of vehicle use can be specified as average annual distance driven per vehicle and for the fleet as a total, purpose of travel (trip destination), infrastructure use (urban, interurban or motorway road transport) and also fuel consumption together with data on CO₂ emissions. Indicators on vehicle use can be tracked in various ways:

• self-administered panels of households, which permit their vehicles to be followed for several years;

• national or local household travel surveys (with a seven-day trip diary);

• official vehicle inspection and vehicle registration files;

• ‘vehicle surveys’ based on vehicle registry data;

• traffic counts;

• data collected for road-charging purposes.

self-administered panels of households, which permit their vehicles to be followed for several years;

national or local household travel surveys (with a seven-day trip diary);

official vehicle inspection and vehicle registration files;

‘vehicle surveys’ based on vehicle registry data;

traffic counts;

data collected for road-charging purposes.

The paper will present a review of mainly vehicle-based survey methods used in France, Germany, Finland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, describing existing sampling frames to their scope, advantages and limitations, as well as their costs. Issues addressed in this context will be further examined in terms of their methodological challenges as well as their purpose.

The leading questions underlying this paper as well as the corresponding workshop are: why is it necessary to have data on passenger travel or transportation; and, looking at international experience, how good are vehicle-based surveys in delivering the required information? In discussing problems experienced in the different countries with data collection and evaluation methods, emphasis will be put on potential strategies for methodological and technological improvement and problem solving. One example is the potential use, benefits and constraints of new survey technologies presented by vehicle tracking techniques.

This chapter summarizes some of the results from the Working Group “National Travel Surveys” in COST Action 355. All 50 presentations could not be reviewed here; thus, we focus on three crucial topics:

• the periodicity of data collection, but also its longitudinal aspects (advantages of continuous surveying, repeated cross-sections vs. panel surveys, etc.),

• new technologies for improving the efficiency and accuracy of mobility surveys (computer-assisted telephone, Web-based, interviews, GPS, GSM, RDS, etc.),

• innovative approaches, exemplified by qualitative surveys combined with conventional quantitative ones, and by biographical approaches.

the periodicity of data collection, but also its longitudinal aspects (advantages of continuous surveying, repeated cross-sections vs. panel surveys, etc.),

new technologies for improving the efficiency and accuracy of mobility surveys (computer-assisted telephone, Web-based, interviews, GPS, GSM, RDS, etc.),

innovative approaches, exemplified by qualitative surveys combined with conventional quantitative ones, and by biographical approaches.

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.