Main means of travel to education and educational institution address

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?