Travel in London Travel in London

11. Spotlight: How has travel by Londoners changed – insights from 10 years of the London Travel
Demand Survey (LTDS)
11. Spotlight: How has travel by Londoners changed -
insights from10 years of the London Travel
Demand Survey (LTDS)
11.1 Brief description of LTDS
TfL’s London Travel Demand Survey is a continuous household survey of the
Greater London area, covering all 32 London boroughs and the City of London. It
has been running on a rolling basis since 2005/06, making the latest full survey year,
2014/15, the 10th year of available data. LTDS is a successor to the household
survey component of the London Area Transport Survey (LATS), last carried out in
2001.
How is the survey carried out?
LTDS captures information on households, people, trips and vehicles. All members
of the household are surveyed, with complete trip detail for a single day recorded
for all household members aged 5 years and over. Three questionnaires are used –
a household questionnaire, individual questionnaires for all household members,
and trip sheets. The household questionnaire is completed by any responsible adult
within the household, and gives details of household structure with basic
demographic information on household members and household characteristics
such as income, housing tenure and vehicle ownership. The individual questionnaire
has to be completed by all members of the household aged 5 and over. This
includes further demographic and travel-related information, including working
status, frequency of use of transport modes, and details of driving licences and
public transport tickets held.
Finally, trip sheets are completed by every household member aged 5 and over.
This captures data on all trips made on a designated travel day, the same day for all
members of the household. Details captured include trip purposes, modes used,
trip start and end times, and the locations of trip origins and destinations and
intermediate interchange points (ie journey stages).
Accessing LTDS data
Top-level findings from LTDS to accompany this report can be found on the LTDS
webpage at:www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and-reports/london-traveldemand-survey.
Specific data requests should be sent to the LTDS team directly, by
emailing LTDSenquiries@tfl.gov.uk.
11.2 Some topical transport questions
The availability of ten years of LTDS data makes it possible to look back over a
decade of change, broadly corresponding to the term of the current MTS. The key
trends and developments relating to aggregate travel demand in London and the
travel behaviour of Londoners are relatively well-known (see, for example, chapter 2
of this report), as are the external drivers that have affected them – for example,
the prolonged economic recession that affected much of the latter part of the last
decade.
In October 2014 TfL published ‘Drivers of Demand for Travel in London: A review
of trends in travel demand and their causes’ (see: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/drivers-
Travel in London, Report 8 205