Experts’ opinions concerning the minimum content of a national household travel survey

Although an extensive literature is available concerning the design of travel surveys, fewer research initiatives have been carried out to determine the content of the survey itself. The objective of the present work is to identify such minimum set through a survey (MTSQ – Mini-Travel Survey Questionnaire) targeted to experts in this field. Moreover, it is investigated whether unanimity exists in the experts’ opinions concerning the importance of various types of questions and whether regional and/or professional differences exist. The MTSQ survey was successfully completed by 81 respondents in October-November 2012, mainly from Europe and North America. The study identified the most important questions, which should form the core of any NHTS. This list is especially useful for countries which do not yet have implemented a NHTS, and for defining the set of questions in case a harmonized household travel survey spanning across different countries will be initialized. Secondly, the paper investigated whether unanimity exists in the experts’ opinions. Our analyses clearly pinpointed different evaluations according to the experts’ characteristics, thus it could be concluded that unanimity is certainly not complete. Thus, whenever developing standards for travel surveys these differences should be taken into account, according to both the prospective data users the intended data usages. Especially the differences with respect to the regional context (North-American versus European), and involvement with the NHTS should be acknowledged.