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Purpose — This paper presents the process of creating a web-based travel survey tool. It aims to define advantages and disadvantages of using the web as a survey tool as well as explain the methodology involved while conducting online travel surveys and technologies that were used in the described tool.

Methodology/approach – This paper presents a web-based origin-destination travel survey tool that was developed to assess the potential of this medium to complement usual large-scale phone surveys conducted regularly in the Quebec province. The first tool (that was updated twice to answer to new needs — people-based regional survey and household-based regional survey) developed for a generator-based survey is presented and discussed. The paper namely describes the technology used as well as the particular functions, both for respondents and administrators that were developed. Particularities of the tools are introduced.

Findings — The experimentations conducted using the web-based survey tool reveal that the key components of the tool that influences the response rates and quality of responses are ease of use of the multiple elements on questionnaire such as maps and form fields and overall design quality of the user interface. While presentation of actual results after conducting surveys using the tool are not the main goal of this paper, some preliminary results such as response rates reveal that between 10% and 20% of the entire community of trip generators like universities responded to the person-based version and around 10% of the sampled households from the general population of a specific region did complete the household-based version.

Research limitations/implications — Web-based survey tools in the transportation domain are still new and are in need of a much larger research base to be able to generalize results and findings further.

Practical implications — The tool presented is using up-to-date technology and refined questionnaire design. In this optics, it tries to push the development of web-based travel surveys further in order to increase response rates and quality of responses.

Originality/value — This paper is, on one hand, one of the first to present a tool that was used for both a person-based and a household-based survey and on the other hand for trip generator communities as well as households sampled for regional surveys. It also presents in great detail the interface used in the questionnaire and the administration toolkit accompanying the web application.

Data fusion and the combination of multiple data sources have been part of travel survey processes for some time. In the current context, where technologies and information systems spread and become more and more diverse, the transportation community is getting more and more interested in the potential of data fusion processes to help gather more complete datasets and help give additional utility to available data sources. Research is looking for ways to enhance the available information by using both various data collection methods and data from various sources, surveys or observation systems. Survey response rates are decreasing over the world, and combining survey modes appears to be an interesting way to address this problem. Letting interviewees choose their survey mode allows increasing response rates, but survey mode could impact the data collected. This paper first discusses issues rising when combining survey modes within the same survey and presents a method to merge the data coming from different survey modes, in order to consolidate the database. Then, it defines and describes the data fusion process and discusses how it can be relevant for transportation analysis and modelling purposes. Benefiting from the availability of various datasets from the Greater Montréal Area and the Greater Lyon Area, some applications of data fusion are constructed and/or reproduced to illustrate and test some of the methods described in the literature.