This synthesis will be of interest to planning, administrative, and traffic officials in state transportation agencies and in metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs); to consultants concerned with the design and conduct of surveys; and to those engaged in developing and applying travel forecasting models. It describes the various facets of planning, designing, conducting, and evaluating household travel surveys. This report of the Transportation Research Board provides information on the manner in which many household surveys are currently carried out and provides comment on the likely changes in the process, in the survey instrument, and in the application of more cost-effective methods of data collection in household travel surveys. This synthesis describes the methods for collection, including survey instrument design, as well as testing and administering the surveys. Information on time and cost requirements is also included, as are descriptions of evaluation and data analysis methods.

The U.S. Dept. of Transport. (DoT) Strategic Plan for FY 1997-2002 identifies 5 performance goals: safety, mobility, econ. growth & trade, human & natural environ., & nat. security. DoT conducts the NPTS to obtain info. on personal travel of U.S. households with respect to why, how, when, where from, where to, how frequently, how long, & with whom. The NPTS also provides info. by subgroups of the pop., e.g., by age, gender, race, zero-vehicle households, which allows important policy analyses of how transport. serves these groups. This report provides the results of the 1995 NPTS of travel by the civilian, non-institutionalized pop. age 5 & older.

Identifies various challenges to the world community of transport survey specialists as well as the larger constituency of practitioners, planners, and decision-makers that it serves and provides potential solutions and recommendations for addressing them.

This overview of developments in transport survey methods from around the world emphasises survey quality and innovation. It contains selected papers from the International Conference on Transport Survey Quality and Innovation, held in the Kruger National Park, South Africa, during August 2001. The conference covered both passenger and freight transport, but was limited to surveys that collect information directly from individuals or organisations so it excludes traffic counts or other observational data collection. Many delegates were from Sub-Saharan Africa and other less developed regions of the world, so there was also an interest in identifying user needs and exploring what can be accomplished outside the North American/Western European regions of the world. This conference was the eighth in a series of international conferences on Survey Methods held since the late 1970s, the previous one having been held in Germany in May 1997, entitled "Transport Surveys: Raising the Standard".