Our Travel Survey

Last thursday the whole class split into small groups and for an hour each throughout the day, with a half hour lapse of each other, we did a survey of the amount of cars entering the university car park in tally form, tallying how many had 1 person or 2,3 etc. The travel survey, was completed at 11am. I was surprised how many cars came in at this time. I thought that the majority of people arriving at uni would be in the morning and around lunchtime.



We did seem to notice that a lot of people were having real problems trying to get into the car park because it was the first couple of days that the barriers had started working, and over half of the people parking at this time were trying to access the car park using their student card, which caused much amusement for us within this hour!



However, I had to leave the survey half way into it because of family chaos, but the time I had completed seemed to be quite constant with cars turning up probably averaging 1 car per 1-2 minutes, and I was surprised to find that most cars only had 1 person in.

Its a shame that there isn't a more wider knowledge, or site that can be posted on nile, so advertise car sharing, because this would reduce the amount of cars by quite a huge ammount.



The questionnaires that were completed were hard to get people to stop. I think it was because most people were in a rush to get to lectures...or so they said!!, and the people that did offer to fill one in, seemed to get bored half way through, so if we had to do this again, I think it would be better to keep it less complicated. I think it was mainly question 5 and 7 that made the questionnaire longer than it looked.



If we were to do the travel survey again, it would be effective if we could get enough people to do it for more than one day, ideally 3 to get more of an average over the week of cars using the car park, and maybe doing hours without the half hour gap, as that data is missing.



As we only had so many groups though, I think it was the best possible solution to space it out through the day like that, and it will give us a good enough result of cars using the car park throughout the day.



Our group struggled considerably to get questionnaires, not just because a lot of people declined, but also because of the lack of people in our group, but we did our best to get as many filled out. It was also raining at the time of our hour outside doing tallies and questionnaires, so this didn't really help either.