The main objective of the Action is to provide guidelines for harmonizing national travel surveys across Europe. This harmonization aims at improving their comparability without preventing longitudinal analyses with previous surveys at country level and therefore should increase data quality at national level. The Action will build bridges between European countries as well as among researchers, enhancing research and disseminating recommendations throughout European society. More specifically, the Action will (i) bring together researchers from different European countries, tackle the data needs and stimulate the network by training junior researchers, and (ii) bridge the gap between academia and society by taking societal needs into account, and link researchers and practitioners via the provision of practical recommendations and sharing experiences and best practice. The concrete outcomes of this Action will be twofold : on one hand, concrete harmonization guidelines (related to protocol, questionnaire design, variables definition, etc) will be built from the field skills coming from researchers involved in NTSs and therefore aware of the needs for continuity with previous surveys in each country; on the other hand, these skills and guidelines will be disseminated to countries, especially New EU Member States, where national travel surveys are still to be set up so that these new surveys rely on commonly agreed best practices.
Harmonized data - travel surveys - vehicle based survey - new technologies - statistical methods
