2008 Metro Vancouver Trip Survey

I’ve been waiting for the 2008 Regional Trip Diary Survey from TransLink for the last two years. I sent a few emails to municipality transportation people and TransLink, and was told it was unavailable. It doesn’t even show up on Google! Thanks to Paul Hillsdon who pointed me to the TransLink website where you can search for it in their document library. It’s great that the information is on TransLink’s website, but the fact that you have to know to search for it as the document library consists solely of a search bar could be improved. Anyway over the next few posts, I want to go over some of the numbers from the survey.

Trip surveys are an important planning tools as they give us a snapshot of a typical 24 hour period. Unlike the mode of transportation data from the census which only looks at journeys to work, the trip survey looks at all trip including work, school, errands, and recreational trips.

According to the last census information in Metro Vancouver:
74.4% of us drove to work,
16.5% took transit,
6.3% walked,
1.7% biked, and
1.1% “othered”.

In the latest trip survey during the:
AM peak
68.5% of all travel was by driving,
14.3% by transit,
1.9% by cycling,
13.5% by walking, and
1.7% by “others”.

During the midday
71.1% of all trip where by driving,
11.4% by transit,
1.1% by cycling,
14.8% by walking, and
1.6% by other.

In the PM peak 
76.9% of all trips were by driving,
14.1% by transit,
1.8% by cycling,
6.6% by walking, and
0.6% by “other”.

This information suggests that transit is doing a better job of getting people to/from work while walking is used more for other forms of travel. It also seems like many walker turn into automobile passengers during the PM peak. Getting people to walk for errand and recreational trips is the most cost-effective way of promoting sustainable transportation and is entirely based on a city’s built form. Increase cycling by improve cycling infrastructure is another easy-win as the cost of improving cycling in orders of magnitude cheaper than transit. I’ll have a look at the modal share based on trip type tomorrow.