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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 offers the first full translation from Russian to English of the Balance of the National Economy of the USSR, 1924–26’s first chapter. Involving 12 authors and composed of 21 chapters, the Balance is a collective work published in June 1926 in Moscow by the Soviet Central Statistical Administration under the scientific supervision of its former director, Pavel Illich Popov (1872–1950). In this first chapter, titled ‘Studying the Balance of the National Economy: An Introduction’, Popov set the theoretical foundations of what might be considered as the first modern national accounting system and paved the way to multisector macroeconometric modelling.