Understanding travel behaviour is key to designing transport systems that meet both the current and future needs of the population. Travel surveys are a vital tool in providing estimates of transport demand and network usage. At their simplest level, transport surveys consist of recording the origins and destinations of travellers, sometimes disaggregated by travel mode and by time of day. More complex travel surveys consist of self completion travel diaries, on-vehicle interviews or focus group discussions where other variables may be collected such interchanges, journey purposes, the frequency of the journey and trade-offs between cost and other factors. Irrespective of the scale of the survey or the number of respondents, obtaining accurate location information on traveller origin, destination, and any interchanges is a key requirement of all travel surveys. This is particularly true when the survey data are to be used for transport planning purposes. Unfortunately, many surveys are carried out in less-than-ideal conditions (roadside, stations, trains, etc.) hence the data yielded by the survey can be inaccurate or incomplete. Therefore, a mechanism – geocoding– is required for post-survey “cleaning” of the location information to an appropriate level of accuracy.

MVA Consultancy has designed, built, and used a geocoding tool – TARA Geocoding – which has been applied in various forms on several very large-scale travel surveys including the London Area Travel Survey (LATS), the DfT’s National Rail Travel Survey, and the Countryside Agency’s England Day Visits Survey. It has also been employed on many smaller regional-level surveys. To date the TARA Geocoding software has cleaned more than 10 million survey addresses. It has been used both as a “back office” application and as Computer-Aided Telephone Interview (CATI) software.  (...)