One third respond to national travel survey questionnaire

A third of the 20,400 households targeted for the National Household Travel Survey submitted the completed questionnaire, exceeding Transport Malta’s expectations.

A spokesman for the transport watchdog confirmed it had got back 6,666 replies from the 20,465 households which had received the questionnaire in the nationwide survey.

The survey was held on May 26 with the aim of shedding light on transportation patterns by producing a snapshot of typical daily travel in the country. Public transport is about to be privatised and reformed.

Basing itself on the experience gathered from the last two travel surveys in 1989 and 1998, Transport Malta had set the target number of responses at 6,000 households. This is considered sufficient to provide “an adequate statistical representation of the national population and provides results that can be adequately used for national/regional scale planning”.

The representative sample will yield a margin of error of only three per cent at a district level and close to one per cent at a national level.

The largest number of responses was received from the northern harbour region, with 1,266 replies from the 3,809 questionnaires sent.

The spokesman said the data collected through the survey, which was conducted by auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, was in the process of being collated and cross-tabulated.

The information will then be analysed to establish current trip patterns and travel behaviour and then compared to the results of previous surveys to reveal changes in travel and transport trends over the past 20 years.

The initial analysis should be completed over the next two months while the first report of the survey is expected to be issued in October.