KITE

Travel behaviour surveys have to win and then maintain the cooperation of respondents from the first to the last contact with them. While not excessively demanding, they do require respondents to engage in a task with a highly variable response burden. This is due to the varying number of journeys undertaken during the reporting period. For long distance travel this can range from zero to dozens of journeys in a typical eight week reporting period. The details about each journey are also substantial (duration, timing, mode, costs, (route) of each stage, i.e. vehicle used), so that respondents have to be conscientious. The specific challenge of longdistance travel surveys is therefore to find a balance between the need to capture the correct number of all such journeys, while obtaining detailed information for at least some of them. In the Framework of the KITE Project (A Knowledge Base for IntermodalPassenger Travel in Europe) a new survey methodology based on the MEST (Methods for European Surveys of Travel Behaviour) and INVERMO (Intermodale Vernetzung) approaches has been developed which contains a journey roster with basic descriptions of long distance journeys and a stage form for the detailed information about the last previous three long distance journeys. During the November 2008 and February 2009 3399 persons were surveyed with two different protocols. The first protocol was used in Switzerland and Portugal and consists of a full CATI for the long-distance travel survey and a written part for the SP questionnaire. In Czech republic the same survey was carried out as face-to-face interviews.