Transportation Tomorrow Survey

Press Releases

The Ministry of Transportation, eighteen municipal governments, GO Transit, and the TTC joined forces to conduct a comprehensive survey of travel patterns called the Transportation Tomorrow Survey (TTS).

This survey consists of telephone interviews of a randomly selected sample of households in central Ontario. The areas outside the Greater Toronto Area were surveyed from September to December 2005 with the GTA and Hamilton-Wentworth to be surveyed during the same period in 2006. The Ministry of Transportation Ontario is providing financial support in both phases of the study.

The purpose of the survey is to collect information on the travel habits of residents and provide a data base for long-range planning and improvement of transportation facilities. Similar surveys were conducted in 1986, 1991,1996 and 2001. In addition to trip information of each household member (i.e. trip origin, destination, time, purpose, method of travel) survey participants are being asked about age, gender, employment status, size of household and number of motor vehicles.

The dramatic growth in traffic, throughout the GTA and beyond, in the last two decades has prompted planners to examine travel trends in detail. Travel patterns of all the members of the selected sample of households are being gathered. The results are being combined in order to get a picture of the overall travel patterns from area to area. The survey is being conducted by confidential telephone interviews with approximately 150,000 randomly selected families. Participants are being asked questions about their trips on a particular day as well as to provide statistical information about the members of the household. All information collected is being kept in the strictest confidence and cannot be traced to an individual household.

The 2006 Survey has been designed to further update the previous studies. Like the 1996 and 2001 surveys, it is gathering travel information from areas external to the GTA. This is providing the third TTS snapshot of travel in these areas and starts to create a transportation data base, similar to the GTA, that can be used for time series analysis including projections of travel needs. The TTS surveys are timed to coincide with the Canadian Census so that general relationships can be made regarding transportation and household characteristics.

Approximately 40,000 households were contacted by the telephone interviewers last year in 2005 with 110,000 to be contacted this year. Letters explaining the purpose of the survey and requesting household participation are being mailed out about one week in advance of the telephone interview.