London Travel Demand Survey

THE CHALLENGE

The London Travel Demand Survey (LTDS) is an annual study of around 8,000 households, randomly selected in London and the surrounding area to establish an understanding of travel behaviours in and around the Capital. The study consists of asking each household to complete three questionnaires relating to different aspects of their travel requirements, individually and collectively. Processing, cleaning and geocoding such large quantities of data is laborious and can be inefficient and inaccurate. The client was looking for a specialised tool that would help them extract the maximum value from their data as well as processing it as quickly, efficiently and as accurately as possible.

SYSTRA’S ROLE

SYSTRA designed and developed a software application called TARA for the management of the London Travel Demand Survey data. The application automates the geocoding of survey address data, identifies unlikely or impossible journeys for manual checking, provides a full audit trail of survey data modifications, and quality checks any manually geocoded data that could not be automatically located using the integrated database.

The software has been in use since 2003 and has been used for the import, cleaning and reporting of over one million LTDS survey records.