Transport Survey Methods, Best Practice for Decision Making

Every three years, researchers with interest and expertise in transport survey methods meet to improve and influence the conduct of surveys that support transportation planning, policy making, modelling, and monitoring related issues for urban, regional, intercity, and international person, vehicle, and commodity movements.

This book compiles the critical thinking on priority topics in contemporary transport policy and planning contexts.

• It is the international reference volume on transport survey methods.
• With contributions from over 100 transport survey specialists, it includes perspectives and insights from the world
• It addresses issues in both standard survey methods, as well as transport policy and planning
• Presents recommendations on how to acquire better data for transport decision making at a time when needs are greatest and available funding is shortest
• Allows decision makers to collect and analyze large amounts of quality data and cut through potential distortions to discover what really works.

The contributed papers cover two key themes related to types of decision-making of importance to the development of data collection on both passenger travel and freight movements: the first theme,

1. Selecting the Right Survey Method, acknowledges the fact that transport survey methods are evolving to meet both changing uses of transport survey data and the challenges of conducting surveys within contemporary society

2. Supporting Transport Planning and Policy, recognizes that the demands on transportation data programs to support decision-making for transport planning and policy making clearly have evolved.

The chapters have been selected with particular emphasis on the challenges of the near and medium term future to the design of transport surveys.  Rapidly evolving problems and policy contexts are compelling transport researchers to advance the state-of-the-art of methods, tools, strategies and protocols, while assuring the stability and coherence of the very data from which trends can be tracked and understood and on which important decisions can be made.

Full Introduction and Table of Contents

In today's difficult global economy, governments are struggling with demands to increase basic services and to do so with fewer available resources... read more of the Introduction