From trips to stages: a methodology for Generating Stage Information in trip-level Household travel surveys

Abstract Trip-level household travel surveys (HTS) are an efficient and widely used instrument in transport planning and research and are expected to remain in this role for at least the near future. Mode information is typically assigned to trips in these surveys based on a hierarchy of transport modes that hides important information on the individual stages which is particularly relevant for walking. This study develops a methodology for estimating detailed stage-level information for trip-level HTS that contain some information on stages, this is the sequence of used transport modes and the number of transfers in Public Transport (PT) trips. The methodology is developed based on detailed stage-level data from a sub-sample in the German National HTS MiD 2017 and directly applied to the German city-based HTS SrV 2018 which is a trip-level survey but contains stage-level information on modes and PT transfers. Linear Regression Models for estimating walking stage duration in PT and car trips are combined with simple heuristic estimations for the less frequent types of intermodal trips. Trip purpose, accompaniment and total trip duration are important predictors for walking stage duration. Trip-level and stage-level modal-split figures for the number, duration, and distance of trips and stages in SrV 2018 are computed with the developed methodology. About half of all stages and 30% of trips are done by walking. Walking stage duration is with around 38% considerable, this share drops to around 12% for walking stage distance.