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Purpose — In the context of evaluating transportation and carbon emission policies, improve weekly activity and mobility scheduling survey methodology in order to enhance data quality while reducing costs and decreasing respondent burden for designing continuous self-administered surveys that are predominantly passive (or computer-assisted).

Approach — Evaluate a set of functionalities deployed in a web travel survey interface (2009) and compare with a pencil-and-paper survey (2002–2003) deployed in Quebec City that sought similar data about weekly mobility. The first used a pencil-and-paper approach complemented by interviews and telecommunications. The second used applets developed in Java, and Google Maps in order to assist geocoding of activity places and the reporting of actual trips into a relational database, while using email to recruit and support respondents.

Implications — Both of these surveys had to address specific technical and privacy challenges during deployment, making their comparison relevant for discussing some of the impacts of information technologies on spatiotemporal data quality, conviviality of survey procedure, respondents' motivation and privacy protection.

Limitations — While neither of these surveys employed movement-aware mobile devices, such as GPS loggers, some of the lessons learnt are relevant to the design issues raised by the increasing deployment of such devices in travel surveys, and by the growing need to manage complex surveys over extended observation periods.

Over the past decade, transportation researchers have leveraged global positioning system (GPS) technology to improve the accuracy and increase the depth of spatial and temporal details obtained through household travel surveys. While earlier studies used GPS as a supplement to traditional household travel survey methods, measuring the accuracy of trips reported (Wolf et al., 2006), studies are now underway to identify the methods and tools that will allow us to do away with paper diaries entirely and simply rely on GPS to obtain trip details. This paper finds that while GPS clearly helps to improve participation among some groups, it decreases participation among others. Thus, it should be considered a tool in the household travel survey toolbox and not “the” solution to non-response issues in household travel surveys.

Purpose — The paper reports on a research project exploring new approaches for analysing travel demand induced by changes in generalised costs of travel and activity participation. The description of the survey approach, which to our knowledge is novel in its application, reports descriptive analyses of the respondents' reactions to the changes implied in the household interviews.

Methodology — A sample of respondents were administered a 5 day travel diary, from which 1 day was selected for further analysis. Travel times for trips conducted that day were changed using predefined heuristics based on the household characteristics to attain significant changes in the generalised costs of the reported trips. Respondents were then presented with these hypothetical scenarios in face-to-face interviews. All household members were asked to state how the implied changes would have affected their activity scheduling on the specified day, i.e. to adapt their reported schedule to the new conditions.

Findings — The postulated induced travel effect could be observed, in that the modifications to the generalised costs of travel affect the respondents' travel patterns in general, and the number and durations of conducted out-of-home activities in particular. However, the predominant reaction to changing travel times is the adaptation of departure time, which does not directly interfere with trip generation. Indicators of the effects have been shown, and are quite weak as far as activity generation effects are concerned. The activities most likely to be re-planned are leisure activities and sojourns at the home location, as is consistent with expectations.

The purpose of this chapter is to provoke thinking about the directions in which the travel survey toolkit should move in the near future based on the author's personal experience and as an outcome of the Travel Survey Methods conference. The chapter begins with a brief historical review that attempts to show some of the major elements of change that have occurred in travel survey methods over the past 40–50 years. A more detailed review is provided about developments over the past 10–15 years. The chapter then explores a number of emerging challenges, including telephone contact of potential respondents, computer-assisted surveys, Internet surveys, mixed-mode surveys, the impacts of language and literacy and the potentials of mobile technologies. Based on this, the chapter then considers future directions that should be pursued. The chapter suggests that it has been changes in survey methodology that have, in the past, sometimes enabled and at other times led to changes in modelling paradigms, and that this may be an appropriate time for travel survey methodology again to enable changes in modelling paradigms. A speculative specification of a new household travel survey that makes use of a number of these developments is then offered. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks that issue a challenge to the travel survey community to think ‘outside the box’ and foster change and improvement in the accuracy and representativeness of travel surveys.

This book provides an international perspective on improving information to support transportation decision making. It comprises a selection of papers plus workshop syntheses from the 9th International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Chile in November 2011. The conference was organized into 14 workshops with both paper presentations and discussions in the workshops forming the majority of the conference activity. The papers reported primarily on research pertaining to continuous improvement in transport survey methods — the backbone of the transportation data pipeline in most countries. But some papers also addressed the new ways in which innovation — notably technological innovation — is being applied to the capture and analysis of data to produce necessary information faster, better, and less expensively. The conference program built on a rich legacy of intellectual pursuits spanning the past two decades, and it is anticipated that the conference will continue into the future. Thus, the contents of this book represent a 5–10 year view through a moving window on the international state of the practice and concerns in transport survey methods.

Purpose — This paper presents the process of creating a web-based travel survey tool. It aims to define advantages and disadvantages of using the web as a survey tool as well as explain the methodology involved while conducting online travel surveys and technologies that were used in the described tool.

Methodology/approach – This paper presents a web-based origin-destination travel survey tool that was developed to assess the potential of this medium to complement usual large-scale phone surveys conducted regularly in the Quebec province. The first tool (that was updated twice to answer to new needs — people-based regional survey and household-based regional survey) developed for a generator-based survey is presented and discussed. The paper namely describes the technology used as well as the particular functions, both for respondents and administrators that were developed. Particularities of the tools are introduced.

Findings — The experimentations conducted using the web-based survey tool reveal that the key components of the tool that influences the response rates and quality of responses are ease of use of the multiple elements on questionnaire such as maps and form fields and overall design quality of the user interface. While presentation of actual results after conducting surveys using the tool are not the main goal of this paper, some preliminary results such as response rates reveal that between 10% and 20% of the entire community of trip generators like universities responded to the person-based version and around 10% of the sampled households from the general population of a specific region did complete the household-based version.

Research limitations/implications — Web-based survey tools in the transportation domain are still new and are in need of a much larger research base to be able to generalize results and findings further.

Practical implications — The tool presented is using up-to-date technology and refined questionnaire design. In this optics, it tries to push the development of web-based travel surveys further in order to increase response rates and quality of responses.

Originality/value — This paper is, on one hand, one of the first to present a tool that was used for both a person-based and a household-based survey and on the other hand for trip generator communities as well as households sampled for regional surveys. It also presents in great detail the interface used in the questionnaire and the administration toolkit accompanying the web application.