Main means of travel to education and educational institution address

Surely whether it was a primary, secondary and tertiary can be determined from the address of the institute in most cases so do we need to ask directly and also can we not infer that from the age of the respondent too?

e.g. 1-12 year old census respondents almost certainly in primary school, after that secondary and over 16 more likely tertiary than secondary but institute address will provide info need.

Question is educational travel question going to be for all ages to respond to or is there a lower cut off? And if so where? 5+? what about pre-schoolers? School leaving age or higher? Why not lower ages too?

Re: Census day v usual travel, believe should ask "usually travel" and with yes/no option for if they travelled like this on On Census Day. as knowing what people do usually is more valuable in planning than Census day only.
Especially for longer term planning.
Accept that Census day provides a snapshot in time but its very narrow and very subject to vageries like weather and other factors so a Census day only answer will not capture the normal situation well.

John to answer your question on why we need this information?
I'm not a planner, but in Auckland we are told 40% of the weekday peak (AM) travel on roads is school/education related.
Being able to confirm (or refute) that is critical to planning for longer term transport needs of cities like Auckland and Christchurch and Wellington etc also other smaller parts of NZ.
If we don't capture this information at Census time it has to be retrospectively deduced from local [Government] surveys - some Local Governments won't even bother with such (expensive) surveys, which then means you cannot accurately compare different parts of NZ travel patterns for the same time ranges.

Thanks Greg. Do we have any transport planners in the wings who can comment on why we need this information?

Knowledge of this would enable better planning of public transport to take into account the need for movement of large numbers of people before and after school. For example, the new network proposed for Auckland needs to take this into account so it is capable of dealing with the demand generated by student's need to travel. The proposals I have seen don't actually make a distinction between "peak" and "off-peak". The high-frequency routes are always at 15 min frequency no matter the time of day, from start of service to finish. Same for the 30 minute frequency feeder routes. Does this design actually take into account the need for carrying capacity? Hard data like this question indicates the level of potential demand.

Good question to ask on travel for education if it includes children. What 'education' is may need clarity. Increasing active transport should be a key health goal. The daily walk to school is an important part of this.

The Ministry of Transport already undertakes sampling of transport to school (5000 people), and we already know in primary school students (age 5-12) are walking and cycling a lot less than they did 25 years ago and relying on their parents to drive them to school. The question is why - are students now further away from their schools or are their parents being overprotective?

Hi John,
I would just reflect What Jonathon has mentioned. The data would also be extremely useful as a base level for our school travel planning programme. Breaking the data down in primary, secondary and tertiary would help us plan the types of infrastructure near these different types of schools i.e. if we can see that primary and tertiary schools have a high mode share for cycling then we can target cycling infrastructure towards these types of schools.

The Household Travel Survey which the moT produces is a useful indicator but given the scale of the Census this would offer a considerable more accurate representation.

See my comments in relation to the work question.

I agree with Gregory that data on education institutions would be helpful in thinking about interventions. Not just relating it to particular schools but also to particular demographics (e.g. income) or parts of cities (e.g. denser versus sprawl suburbs).

But with an increasing number of people who neither work nor go to school, but who have other regular activities (notably volunteer activities), I would like to see statistics on how they travel.

A useful question would be how far is it to walk to school - or how long would it take. Also is public transport available for the school journey. The MoT data isn't comprehensive enough to get a good picture of what is going on.

Great discussion guys - thanks. All the examples of what information and how it is used are valuable...

Love the ideas and question... as a bit of an aside and having done some research into walking school buses, I'm not sure if we can expect the census to answer questions about why increasing numbers of children are being driven to school... the reasons for why people use particular modes of travel are complicated.

I like all the examples about how information about travel to education would be useful. Does anyone have any examples of how it might be valuable to understand people who travel for reason other than work or education?
How do these information needs compare in terms of importance/value?

How people travel has big health impacts so understanding how most people travel most of the time probably is most important! I understand the disability question is used to target more indepth surveys in that area. so maybe the travel to education question can be used in the same way to get a better information on the why of journeys?

Maybe the journeys to be tracked should be those 'required' or 'regular' as against 'voluntary' or 'irregular'?. So required includes work and education and business meetings, but recreation are 'voluntary' and holiday trips are irregular.

The tourism industry is an example of a sector that is interested in travel patterns that would not be captured by the current focus on work trips.

A huge proportion of trips are discretionary - to shops, to sports events, to friends houses, for tramping, etc. Often people will own a vehicle or a particular vehicle specifically for those events (e.g. if you have a horse float or boat you are likely to own a larger car). And often it is those sorts of trips that are least possible by public transport, because the network either doens't exist (e.g. no weekend bus service in a provincial town) or is designed to get people from a suburb to the CBD but not between suburbs. So I am not transport disadvantaged for most trips (to shops, to opera, even to visit relatives in other cities), but most tramping destinations in the southern North Island are inaccessible to me. Having said that, I'm not sure what questions a census can most easily answer about that sort of issue, as opposed to more in depth surveys of how transport choices and urban design affect individuals and households.

Great, thanks guys - ok I'm hearing that we most need information about those trips that are regular... while data about those random trips might be needed less. And that for those regular trips we need to understand what people are travelling to.

We are entering the days of alternative mobility - the roads are full and it is often physically and fiscally impossible to expand them. As a community, we need to make better use of the road resource that exists, and if there is not currently a train or a plan for a train, we will all be very old and grey before the debate moves off the road.
So the usefulness of data about how we travel is related to very specific corridors and how (where populations are expanding) we will convert ever greater numbers of people from being 'drivers' to being 'passengers', especially during peak travel times when there is not enough room for all the vehicles.

Much information can be gained about the use of the roads from surveys - but what you find is that the samples are too small to be able to apply it to a specific corridor. So the census is a very valuable source of this type of data: to understand specific trip-making patterns, and to identify places where alternative services might work.
Question design is a specific skill, and ensuring continuity between censuses (sp?) important, so I hope the above is a useful explanation about why the information will be valuable.
If there was enough time and space, I would ask everyone to tell us about all the trips they make on a given day: mode, destination, purpose, etc. Of course, we will not be able to get that much info, so any subset needs to deliver the maximum possible proportion. Oh, and also it would be worth measuring latent demand as well - as in 'I would have travelled if I had been able to'.

I wonder if the confidentiality policy for individuals is appropriate for dwelling and work trips? By the time random rounding and confidentiality factors have been added at both ends of a trip the meshblock level data is so depleted that it is not useful. But at an area unit level it is too coarse for transport planning. There can be a very large number of trips recorded as zero distance because people can travel to work in the same area unit a significant distance.

Census information on travel is important as it is the only NZ wide picture that we get (even if a snapshot). How far people travel by each mode will start to give us some useful information to assess impacts - how much cost per kilometre, benefit per km etc.

The reason for asking main means of travel to work, and then potentially including main means of travel to education is to try and capture the location and direction of peak traffic flows. The reason for potentially including travel to education is that this is a topic that has been raised as important by local governments in the past. We have been able to visualise travel to work data here. See: http://www.stats.govt.nz/datavisualisation/commuterview/index.html#
School transport particularly can increase peak time flows and there is a noticeable easing off of traffic in main centres during school holidays.

The census cannot collect all information around a particular topic and must instead prioritise for the most important information that can be easily collected and answered.

There are some alternative sources of data (although not at a small area level). The Ministry of Transport runs a household transport survey, which includes the following information: “Each year, people in more than 4,600 households throughout New Zealand are invited to participate in the survey by recording all their travel over a two-day period. Each person in the household is then interviewed about their travel and is also asked about their alcohol consumption and other travel-related information.” See http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/travelsurvey/reportsandfactsheets/

As mentioned in the travel to work section main mode does not provide a good picture of how people travel because it ignores the important connector modes like walking (important for health info also). Bus travel (and train for some) is a main means of travel to education but doesn't get picked up in Census data (I don't think).

Thanks everyone for sharing your knowledge and expertise.
Re your question @ellenblake, if the 2018 Census did include a travel to education question (as we recommend be considered) then we would collect information about mode of travel, including bus or train.

I agree with Ellen that mode of travel needs to record multiple modes, not just the main mode, used in a single trip. I accept traffic planners need to information on peak traffic flows, but if they don't know how much walking people do on their journeys to work or education - regardless of whether their main mode of transport is car, bus, bike or on foot - planners won't include basic necessities like pedestrian crossings in their plans.

1. I agree that adding a question regarding travel to activities other than work is critical - it seems strange to me that only work has been covered in the past. As other posters have indicated, this excludes a large and significant proportion of the population. Ideally, I would also like to see a question that captures other activities, such as volunteering or other non-employment.
2. In terms of mode of travel, it is also critical moving forward that questions capture multiple modes. People already use multiple modes of transport (particularly public transport), and this likely to increase in Auckland with the upcoming move to zonal fares encouraging transfers in public transport journeys. Some form of scale or proportions allowing people to identify their main mode of transport (for consistency with past Censuses) and also their secondary modes would be very valuable. The question as it stands that only allows one response and thus ignores many significant transport methods e.g. walking, an integral part of almost any journey) and can thus contribute to funding allocation away from areas of need. Whatever specific form it takes, improvement is badly needed.
3. Including the address of work, education, etc. would also be valuable in providing origin and destination data for typical journeys, which transport planners would surely appreciate. This would be a nice addition if it and similar nice-to-have additions do not lengthen the Census too much.
4. II can see the merits of both usual and Census day travel modes. Again without lengthening the Census too much, could both be worked in?