Main means of travel to education and educational institution address

Education related travel is too narrow an alternative question, as people will often travel for reasons or even for "unpaid" work that is not considered paid e.g. Charity work or people who are NOT working sufficient paid hours (or ANY paid hours) to be considered "working" and/or may be travelling for medical treatment or other purposes.

Therefore I suggest the question be rephrased to ask about "other" related travel, and the address/name of the insitution travelled to as is proposed but then ask them to indicate (e.g. via check box) if the travel is mainly for Education purposes or not (with the possibility of a write option for what the purpose is if it is not).

That way the degree of "education" related travel can be captured, but also allows the capture of the demand that people are travelling, place on the transport networks, but who are not studying or working.

Edit: spelling corrections

Similar to the "Usual" method of travel for Work related question this one should also have a question as to whether "I travelled for this purpose on Census day" would allow a similar comparison between "Usual" work travel and Census day only work travel for "Usual" Education/Other travel and Census day Education/Other travel.

Hi Greg.
Welcome and thanks starting the conversation...

Greg, I think it's more asking about commuting, or the travel that occurs on a regular basis on a regular timetable rather than incidental, one off, travel.

While the incidental travel does also place a burden on the travel networks, it's very different to the commuting patterns shown by people who are commuting to work or regular education classes.

Yes but there are two competing requirements here.

1. Consistency with previous census which only asked how did you travel (and for paid work only) on Census day - it is not how do you usually travel to work.

2. Desire to capture how respondents usually travel to handle the effect of some people's travel on Census day is not at all like thier regular travel patterns. e.g. they may fly to a meeting (or to a holiday) in another town in NZ on Census day, yet usually travel by car or train or bicycle the rest of the year.

Currently if the 2013 questions remained they'd answer the how did you travel to work on census day question
with "I flew" or "I did not travel for work on that day" in the above two examples.

So by changing the "Travel" question to "usual" travel you can capture (2) but not (1) reliably - you can only assume that Census day travel was consisent.

But by adding a question to the effect that responents indocate that "I also travelled this way on Census day". Does allow direct comparison of Census day travel sets between this and prior census.

And also allow a new set of data based on how you 'usually travel' which is what this question change is trying to achieve.

Without this sort of additional question you lose as much as you gain by changing the question from "Census Day" to "usual".

I know there is a reluctance to add any questions to the census as each one has a "cost", but the risk of changing the travel question to usuallly compromises the ability to have a congurent data set with prior census.
A lot of use is made of the travel on Census day data set to capture changes to travel transport modes over time.

Also do not assume that people only travel for work or educational purposes. Therefore restricting the question to education only is restrictive. Yes it captures a data set that is not currently captured, but also ignores that there are many reasons why people travel and not all of it it for paid work.
Obvious examples include charity workers who are not paid, yet are "working" in the strict sense of the word.
Others are travelling to get (regular) medical treatment, or are travelling to provide (unpaid) care care for relatives.
These are but two examples I can think of, I am sure many others can be found as well.

These travel patterns are just as important and likely to grow over time so being able to capture them Nationally over time is a valuable data set. Which good census question design can enable to occur.

So a focus on just education and work travel patterns is way too narrow.

I think it is unreasonable to expect the census questions to cover all activities, otherwise the questionnaire would be ridiculously long. Personally I'm very pleased to see they are aiming to include "transport to education" in the upcoming census. Ignoring the 10 of thousands of students that travel into Auckland CBD everyday was a huge oversight in the previous census.

You can easily capture educational and other than educational travel with well designed questions and a write in option if needed. You don't need dozens more questions to do so.
And the numbers who don't travel for either paid work or education are huge and equally important too. We should not try and fix one problem - only to make more mistakes as we do so.

The best census questions are those that keep giving useful answers year after year and census after census.
And while education travel is a "big thing" now, will it be so in 20 or 30, 50 years time?

If we narrowly focus on travel for education, it will end up like questions asking about how many gas lights, domestic servants or fax machines you had in your house - useful once but not "now".

There are 758,000 primary and secondary school students in New Zealand according to latest figures - that's one-sixth of the country's population. Considering nearly all of them are travelling during morning peak, they have a big impact on our transport system - and that's before even considering tertiary students!

Thanks everyone for all your ideas. I'm hearing that the reasons for travel are diverse and there would be value in getting a richer picture of this...a question is getting a clear picture of why we need the information/details for?

Hi,
From a Local Authority perspective I believe that adding this question into the Censes would be extremely beneficial. It would provide us with a lot more travel information and will help understand how younger people travel. It would be beneficial to have the answers broken down into whether the journey was to a primary, secondary or tertiary education facility.

For consistency it would make sense if the question was worded as 'on census day' rather than relating to usual mode.