The 2001 NHTS was sponsored by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Federal Highway Administration of the U.S. Department of Transpor-tation. Households were asked about all the trips 1 they took on a specific day (daily travel), known as the “travel day,” and about trips of 50 miles or more taken from home in the 27 days preceding and including the travel day, a period known as the “travel period.” Detailed characteristics were collected for each trip including, among other things, the mode of transportation, the purpose of the trip, and the distance traveled. Additionally, households were asked to provide information about their social and demographic characteristics including income, vehicle ownership, as well as the age, sex, education level, and so forth of household members. The 2001 NHTS collected information from 26,000 households nationally.
The NHTS combines two previous surveys—the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey (NPTS), a survey of daily travel, and the American Travel Survey (ATS), a survey of long-distance travel. The NPTS and ATS both were last conducted in 1995. Because of methodological changes, comparisons between the 2001 NHTS and the 1995 NPTS and ATS are not attempted here. Analysts need more time to study the effects of the methodological changes before meaningful comparisons can be made. The information presented here, therefore, is limited to preliminary data from the 2001 survey.
Moreover, data from the travel period component (i.e., long-distance travel) of the NHTS had not yet been released when this report was prepared. As a result, the information presented here is about the travel reported on the travel day, which is predominantly, though not exclusively, local travel. Without the long-distance travel data, vacation trips and travel by air tend to be underrepresented.
1 A trip is defined as traveling from one address to another, whether it is down the street, across town, or cross country.