Harmonisation of national travel surveys in Europe - OPTIMISM WP2: Harmonisation of national travel statistics in Europe

Abstract

National travel surveys are collected in a large number of European countries. This data, if harmonised, could provide useful insights into travel patterns of European citizens and help inform infrastructure provision and policy development, particularly in the area of encouraging sustainable mobility and intermodality. A possible solution is to propose a structure for a harmonised national travel survey. To do so, firstly, a theoretical framework needed to be created. This framework consists of a selection of future mobility policies that can be identified for all EU Member States. In a second step, the identified policies were then linked to a set of parameters and variables that are required to perform a sound quantitative and qualitative analysis in relation to the current and future status of the mobility network in relation to these policies. A third step was then performed to identify those parameters for which NTS is a valid instrument. In the end, a set of 48 parameters was composed. For each of these parameters technical information (sampling frequency, data format, etc.) and a data grouping is suggested. The research, has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the project OPTIMISM, grant agreement n° 284892