| Travel by Scottish
residents: some National Travel Survey results |
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| 1
Introduction |
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| 1.1 This
Bulletin provides information from the National Travel
Survey (NTS) about travel within Great Britain by
Scottish residents. The NTS covers a sample of households
across Great Britain, and is conducted by the Office for
National Statistics (ONS) on behalf of the Department of
the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR). The
results of the NTS for Great Britain as a whole appear
each year in DETR publications, which include a few
figures for Scotland alongside statistics for other parts
of Great Britain. This bulletin is the first publication
which concentrates upon the NTS statistics of travel by
Scottish residents. We acknowledge gratefully the help of
the DETR Transport Statistics staff who provided the
statistics for this bulletin, and made some helpful
comments upon the draft. |
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| 1.2 The NTS
collects information about all kinds of personal travel
for which the main reason for the journey is for the
traveller to reach the destination. The survey therefore
covers travel for private purposes, for work, and for
education. Commuting is included. Journeys in the course
of work are also included if they fulfil the requirement
that the main reason for the journey is for the traveller
to reach the destination. However, travel in the course
of work to convey passengers or to deliver goods is
excluded (eg travel in the course of their work by bus
drivers, lorry drivers and postmen). Notes on the NTS's
coverage and definitions appear in Section 4.3. |
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| 1.3 The NTS
is not designed to produce annual figures for Scotland:
each year's sample includes only 300 or so Scottish
households, so the samples for a number of years must be
combined in order to produce Scottish results, and even
they will be subject to sampling variability. In a few
places in this bulletin, the NTS's statistics suggest an
unusual pattern in a comparatively infrequent type of
travel, based upon relatively few journeys in the NTS's
sample. In such cases, this may be the result of sampling
variability rather than reflecting a real-life situation.
For this reason, some tables show the numbers of people
in the sample, and italics identify figures which are
based upon fewer than 300 journeys in the sample (and so
could be affected by particularly high percentage
sampling errors). |
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