The National Travel Survey (NTS) is a household survey on the travel behaviour of respondents, including their use of public transport and sustainable travel such as walking and cycling, use of electric vehicles (EVs), and road collisions.
Data from the NTS is used to help monitor the implementation of transport policy and will inform future transport initiatives.
It is a voluntary survey carried out by the Central Statistics Office under Section 24 of the Statistics Act,1993.
The NTS was carried out in the months September to December of 2024. In previous iterations of the survey, the survey was carried out in Quarter 4 (Q4) (October to December) only.
Respondents were asked questions to detail their travel over a 24-hour period. The travel reference days, i.e. the days for which travel data was collected, covered the period 02 September 2024 until 11 January 2025.
A new data collection model was introduced for the NTS in 2024, which facilitated the extension of the data collection period to include the month of September. More information on this new data collection model will be provided under ‘Survey Design’ below.
The NTS is carried out censally (in the same year as the Census of Population) and inter-censally (between Censuses). Prior to the 2024 survey, the NTS was carried out in Q4 2021 and previous to this, every two years in 2014, 2016, and 2019 (also in Q4).
The NTS questionnaire was designed by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in consultation with the Department of Transport (DoT), the National Transport Authority (NTA), and the Road Safety Authority (RSA).
Up to and including 2016, the survey was carried out as a module of the Quarterly National Household survey (QNHS)and primarily focussed on the travel behaviour of respondents. The information collected included the following:
The topics covered by the survey have expanded over recent years, and now also includes questions on:
A copy of the National Travel Survey 2024 Questionnaire (PDF 222KB) is available on the CSO website.
A new data collection model was introduced for the NTS in 2024. When the survey was last carried out in Q4 2021, the achieved sample size was 3,027 respondents. To facilitate reporting in greater detail on modes of travel used less frequently and also on the new topics introduced over recent years, a new data collection model was introduced which resulted in more than doubling the achieved sample for the survey (6,546 respondents in the 2024 survey).
See Table 9.1 for a detailed breakdown of the achieved sample.
The questionnaire was developed for multi-mode data collection, with respondents given the option of either an online (CAWI: Computer Assisted Web Interview) or face-to-face interview (CAPI: Computer Assisted Personal Interview).
A copy of the survey questionnaire can be found on the methodology page.
The NTS was collected directly from private individuals, selected from the Census sampling frame. Institutional households, (e.g. nursing homes, barracks, boarding schools, hotels, etc.) are not covered by the survey.
A household is defined as a single person or group of people who usually reside together in the same accommodation and who share the same catering arrangements. The household members are not necessarily related by blood or marriage.
Information was collected directly from selected persons. A person is defined as a "Usual Resident" of a private household if they:
(i) Live regularly at the dwelling in question, and
(ii) Share the main living accommodation (i.e., kitchen, living room, or bathroom) with the other members of the household.
Proxy responses from other members of the household were not accepted.
Data collection for the NTS was constructed in two phases. In the first phase (CAWI, online), each of the 15,000 selected people were issued an email with a link to the online questionnaire. This period of data collection ran for a period of four weeks, including one reminder to respondents, one week after the initial post out.
Following this first phase of data collection, all non-respondents were issued to the CSO team of up to 100 Field Interviewers and 10 Field Coordinators (each with a team of 10 interviewers). Interviewers received in-house training at the CSO on the information collected in the questionnaire, information such as detailed explanations about the questionnaire and definitions of the concepts involved and examples.
This phase was conducted using a team of face-to-face interviewers using CAPI. Respondents could choose to complete via CAWI (online) mode at this point also.
The sample for the NTS was a Stratified Simple Random Sample (SSRS), stratified by administrative county and quintiles derived from the Pobal HP (Haase and Pratschke) Deprivation Index. The sampling frame is the 2022 Census. A target of 15,000 individuals were selected for interview.
The total selected sample size for the NTS was 15,000 individuals. The total achieved sample was 6,744 respondents, of which there were 198 partial interviews and 6,546 completed interviews, the breakdown of which is detailed in Table 9.1 above.
Design weights were calculated for all individuals in the initial sample. The design weights are computed as the inverse of the selection probability of the unit. The purpose of design weights is to eliminate the bias induced by unequal selection probabilities.
These design weights were then adjusted for non-response. This eliminated the bias introduced by discrepancies caused by non-response, particularly critical when the non-responding persons are different from the responding ones in respect to some survey variables as this may create substantial bias in the estimates. Design weights are adjusted for non-response by dividing the design weights of each responding unit in the final / achieved sample by the (weighted) response probability of the corresponding group or strata.
To obtain the final individual weights for the results, after the previous steps were carried out, the distribution of households by deprivation, NUTS3 region, sex, and age was calibrated to the population of individuals aged 18 years and over for Quarter 3 (Q3) 2024. The CALMAR2-macro, developed by INSEE, was used for this purpose. Benchmark information was used to gross up the data to population estimates as of Q3 2024. The benchmark estimates were based on:
To provide national population results, the survey results were weighted to represent the entire population of persons 18 years and over. The survey results were weighted to agree with population estimates broken down by age group, sex, and region, and were also calibrated to nationality totals.
The design weights are computed as the inverse of the selection probability of the unit. The purpose of design weights is to eliminate the bias induced by unequal selection probabilities.
These design weights were then adjusted for non-response. This eliminated the bias introduced by discrepancies caused by non-response, particularly critical when the non-responding households are different from the responding ones in respect to some survey variables as this may create substantial bias in the estimates. Design weights are adjusted for non-response by dividing the design weights of each responding unit in the final / achieved sample by the (weighted) response probability of the corresponding group or strata.
To obtain the final weights for the results, after the previous steps were carried out, the distribution of households by deprivation, NUTS3 region, sex, and age, was calibrated to the population of households in Q3. The CALMAR2-macro, developed by INSEE, was used for this purpose.
The sum of row or column percentages in the tables may not add to 100.0% due to rounding.
Percentage breakdowns exclude cases where the interviewee did not respond.
Estimates for number of people, where there are less than 50 people in a cell, are too small to be considered reliable are presented with ‘..’ in the relevant tables.
Care should be taken when interpreting the results or when comparing them with other data sources such as POWSCAR. POWSCAR is the 2016 Census of Population Travel to Work, School, and College Census of Anonymised Records and is available at the following link Census 2011 Place of Work, School or College - Census of Anonymised Records (POWSCAR). POWSCAR should be used as the definitive source of data on travel to work, school, and college. When comparing the NTS results to POWSCAR data, it should be noted that the NTS journey purpose of ‘work’ includes both commuter and business travel, while the POWSCAR data includes commuter travel only. The NTS collected travel data for a specific day while the Census collected travel data for the ‘usual’ journey to work, school, or college. Similarly, when examining issues such as the mode share for travel to school / education, it is important to note that the NTS doesn't accurately reflect the mode share for the whole student population as the NTS only sampled persons aged 18 years and over.
Data from other international sources / surveys indicates that there can be significant seasonal variations in travel patterns. The NTS travel reference days spanned the Christmas and New Year holiday period when travel patterns may be atypical. This period also encompasses the shortest days and some of the coldest and wettest weather of the year. Estimation of survey results from data relating to only one day’s activity for a sample of journey introduces a statistical variability which would not be present if a full year’s data had been collected.
The survey was asked of adults, aged 18 years and over, resident in the Republic of Ireland.
A journey is defined as a one-way course of travel from location A to location B for the purpose of carrying out a specific activity at location B. A location could be a single premise (e.g. a house, an apartment, a shop, an office, etc.) or a complex of premises (e.g. a shopping centre, a factory site, a hospital, etc.). Return trips were recorded as separate journeys. To be relevant to the survey, journeys must have:
Commenced in the travel reference day (it may end the following day)
Been at least 100 metres in length (approximately a one minute walk)
Comprised exclusively of domestic travel (all stages of foreign travel were excluded)
Not formed an integral part of a respondent's routine employment (e.g. milkman, taxi driver, etc.)
The purpose of a journey is governed by what action was taken at the end of the journey.
Where a journey consists of more than one mode of travel, the main mode of travel is determined by the mode of travel used for the greatest distance. In the event of there being more than one main mode of travel (i.e. when two or more modes are of equal distance), then the main mode of travel is determined by the mode of travel used for the earliest stage of the journey.
This is calculated as the sum of time spent on each stage of the journey and not the difference between the start and end time of a journey.
The travel reference period is 4am to 3:59am. This allowed the capture of information for respondents who finish work or return from leisure activities after midnight.
To ensure that data was collected for all seven days of the week, each person participating in the NTS was assigned a selected 'travel reference day'. The travel reference day was a maximum of three days prior to the day on which the interview was conducted to ensure that recall was not compromised.
For interviews conducted on Wednesday through to Saturday, the travel reference day was the immediately preceding day, i.e. if a person was interviewed on Friday October 10th, the travel reference day would be Thursday October 9th.
For interviews conducted on Mondays a different arrangement applied - 30% of Monday interviews were assigned at random to the immediately preceding Friday, 42% to the immediately preceding Saturday and 28% to the immediately preceding Sunday.
For interviews conducted on Tuesdays, 17% were assigned at random to the immediately preceding Sunday and 83% were assigned to the immediately preceding Monday.
This classification is created from an aggregation of population density estimates derived from the Census of Population. The categories included in each aggregate are explained below:
The regional classifications are based on the NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units) classification used by Eurostat. Until Q4 2017, the NUTS3 regions corresponded to the eight Regional Authorities established under the Local Government Act, 1991 (Regional Authorities) (Establishment) Order, 1993, which came into operation on 1 January 1994 while the NUTS2 regions, which were proposed by Government and agreed by Eurostat in 1999, were groupings of those historic NUTS3 regions.
However, the NUTS3 boundaries were amended on 21st of November 2016 under Regulation (EC) No. 2016/2066 and have come into force from Q1 2018. These new groupings are reflected in the LFS results from Q1 2012 onwards. The changes resulting from the amendment are that County Louth has moved from the Border to the Mid-East and what was formerly South Tipperary has moved from the South-East to the Mid-West, resulting in the new NUTS2 and NUTS3 regions:
| Northern & Western NUTS2 Region | Southern NUTS2 Region | Eastern & Midland NUTS2 Region | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Border | Cavan Donegal Leitrim Monaghan Sligo |
Mid-West | Clare Limerick Tipperary |
Dublin | Dublin City Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Fingal South Dublin |
| South-East | Carlow Kilkenny Waterford Wexford |
Mid-East | Kildare Louth Meath Wicklow |
||
| West | Galway Mayo Roscommon |
South-West | Cork Kerry |
Midland | Laois Longford Offaly Westmeath |
The Central Statistics Office wishes to thank the respondents to the survey, for their co-operation in agreeing to take part in the National Travel Survey and for facilitating the collection of the relevant data.
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