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Purpose — In the context of evaluating transportation and carbon emission policies, improve weekly activity and mobility scheduling survey methodology in order to enhance data quality while reducing costs and decreasing respondent burden for designing continuous self-administered surveys that are predominantly passive (or computer-assisted).

Approach — Evaluate a set of functionalities deployed in a web travel survey interface (2009) and compare with a pencil-and-paper survey (2002–2003) deployed in Quebec City that sought similar data about weekly mobility. The first used a pencil-and-paper approach complemented by interviews and telecommunications. The second used applets developed in Java, and Google Maps in order to assist geocoding of activity places and the reporting of actual trips into a relational database, while using email to recruit and support respondents.

Implications — Both of these surveys had to address specific technical and privacy challenges during deployment, making their comparison relevant for discussing some of the impacts of information technologies on spatiotemporal data quality, conviviality of survey procedure, respondents' motivation and privacy protection.

Limitations — While neither of these surveys employed movement-aware mobile devices, such as GPS loggers, some of the lessons learnt are relevant to the design issues raised by the increasing deployment of such devices in travel surveys, and by the growing need to manage complex surveys over extended observation periods.

This book provides an international perspective on improving information to support transportation decision making. It comprises a selection of papers plus workshop syntheses from the 9th International Conference on Transport Survey Methods in Chile in November 2011. The conference was organized into 14 workshops with both paper presentations and discussions in the workshops forming the majority of the conference activity. The papers reported primarily on research pertaining to continuous improvement in transport survey methods — the backbone of the transportation data pipeline in most countries. But some papers also addressed the new ways in which innovation — notably technological innovation — is being applied to the capture and analysis of data to produce necessary information faster, better, and less expensively. The conference program built on a rich legacy of intellectual pursuits spanning the past two decades, and it is anticipated that the conference will continue into the future. Thus, the contents of this book represent a 5–10 year view through a moving window on the international state of the practice and concerns in transport survey methods.

The purpose of this paper is to compare internal and external job mobility (quits and promotions) as separate mechanisms for workers improving earnings and job fit.

The authors sample the core workforce from the British Household Panel Survey, estimating the effects of quits and promotions on two sets of outcomes. The first is subjective; satisfaction with work, pay and hours. The second is objective realities about the job; gross monthly pay and weekly working hours. The authors use linear fixed-effects estimation to control for individual heterogeneity.

Quits and promotions are distinctly different mechanisms for improving earnings and job fit. Quits improve measures of job fit (satisfaction with work, pay and hours) but have little effect on earnings. Internal promotions bring earnings growth but have little effect on job fit. The findings shed light what drives “voluntary” mobility; internal mobility may be driven by higher “reservation wages” and career progression, while external mobility may be driven by job matching and the need to find more appropriate work.

Researchers should treat mobile labour markets with scepticism. The growth of “boundaryless careers” may closer resemble a release valve for poor working conditions in a varied market than a growth in new opportunities for earnings and career progression.

Studies of job mobility overwhelmingly focus on the effects quitting without explicitly comparing this mobility to promotions. This omission gives an incomplete picture of mobility. Bringing promotions back into the discussion, helps to understand why workers commit to internal careers and firm tenure. The paper shows that quits and promotions yield distinctly different outcomes for core workers, despite both mobility types being labelled “voluntary”. Thus, the authors show that inequality in earnings and working conditions is closely tied to access to the “life-chances” of mobility; those who are able to pursue promotion are rewarded objectively; those who quit for a new employer seek a better job fit.

Large-scale continuous mobility surveys have some advantages over less frequent (usually every 10 years), even larger-scale cross-sectional surveys; these advantages have been well documented in previous papers (Ampt & Ortúzar, 2004).

In this paper we first define what we mean by ‘ongoing mobility surveys’. We then describe the state of practice in this context, briefly reviewing the state of affairs in all the cases that we are aware of. We then discuss some problems encountered in practice and offer ideas for improvement. In particular, we discuss a wide range of issues that are likely to act as barriers to a high quality and sustainable implementation and suggest approaches for improvement. Issues covered include sampling frames and sampling methods, survey methods, respondent burden, weighting processes and expansion, and the increased importance of developing and maintaining field staff motivation. We also touch briefly on the practical/political issue of securing ongoing funding. Throughout, we advance some thoughts to try and explain why this method has not gained wider acceptance, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere where there are more examples of travel surveys in general.

The paper also raises some ideas and issues about the way in which ongoing mobility surveys can best collect data for the environmental accounting of travel. Finally, we raise questions about the environmental impact of the survey methods themselves as a stimulus for further consideration.

This paper documents how gender differences in occupational status (defined by earnings, education, and returns to skills) have evolved over time and across generations. The paper finds a persistent gender earnings gap, a reversal of the education gap, and a convergence in starting salaries and returns to experience. Divergent occupational choices might explain part of the persistent gender gaps and women’s failure to reach parity with men in the earnings distribution. Women choose more flexible jobs than men. But whereas men dominate women in high-powered occupations, they are also more likely to be in low-skilled low-pay occupations. Differential effects of children and time spent keeping house explain most of the gender gap in high-powered occupations but cannot explain fully why women choose more flexible occupations.

On 24 January 2020, France informed WHO of three cases of novel coronavirus, all of whom had travelled from Wuhan, China. These three cases were the first confirmed cases in Europe. By 13 March 2020, Europe had become the epicentre of the pandemic with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined, apart from the People’s Republic of China. Many European countries like Italy, France and Germany took drastic actions and subsequently announced a lockdown, while other countries like the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden were much more hesitant to introduce such far-reaching safety measures. This chapter provides a literature overview of how the variation in such measures in Europe has ultimately resulted in changes in daily activities and travel behaviour during the pandemic. It focusses on five main themes: (i) reduction in mobility and activities, (ii) spatial-temporal adjustments in out-of-home activities in which people still participated, (iii) modal adjustments especially among people who used to travel by public transport before the pandemic, (iv) new out-of-home activities including new outdoor activities and (v) digital adaptations as several out-of-home activities were replaced by digital activities, with special attention to the experience of teleworking.