Transforming Montreal’s Household Travel Survey: Innovations to Address Declining Response Rates, Enhance Data Quality, and Improve Data Dissemination

Montreal’s Household Travel Survey underwent substantial methodological changes with its 2023 edition to address challenges such as declining response rates, demographic biases and evolving privacy regulations. The Autorité régionale de transport métropolitain (ARTM – Metropolitan Regional Transportation Authority) oversaw the transition from traditional Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing methods to a combination of postal invitations and Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing techniques, informed by pilot studies in 2021 and 2022. Innovations such as simplified invitation letters, dynamic diary day assignment, and an improved survey interface contributed to achieving 109,000 valid weekday responses, exceeding the initial target of 73,500. To safeguard respondent privacy, the ARTM updated its consent framework, redesigned the survey’s zone system, and replaced precise geographic coordinates with these updated aggregated spatial units in its non-partner disaggregate datasets, to balance analytical utility with privacy protections. A new data access portal, time-limited licenses and best practices-informed user’s guide aim to strengthen compliance and improve accountability. The survey also incorporated questions addressing shifts in travel behavior such as remote work, and introduced supplementary frequency-based questions to better capture variability in daily travel patterns and measure mobility habits. These enhancements aim to provide accurate, inclusive, and privacy-conscious data to support research and policy development while laying the foundation for future improvements, including more frequent or annualized surveys and the integration of complementary data sources.