The New Zealand Household Travel Survey is an ongoing survey of household travel conducted for the Ministry of Transport. From 2018 onwards, each year people in over 2,000 households throughout New Zealand are invited to participate in the survey, by recording all their travel over a 2-day period. Each person in the household was asked about their travel and other related information.
Note that this travel survey captures travel in the road/footpath environment (and domestic flights and ferries) — off-road activities such as mountain biking and hiking are not included in these estimates. Professional driver trips (including cycling trips such as mail and pamphlet delivery) have been excluded from the analysis.
The 2020 - 2023 data is from 18,171 people in 8,783 households, collected between July 2020 and August 2023.
Please note that face to face surveying was interrupted by COVID 19 restrictions from March 2020 to April 2023. The 2019/20 survey year was cut short and ended in late March 2020, and the next survey year did not start until Aug 2020. Survey years normally run July 20XX - June 20XX+1.
New Zealand used two different methods of categorizing COVID restrictions. The Alert Level System was used from March 2019 until December 2021 when it was replaced with the Traffic Light Setting (which finished in September 2022). Both systems set out rules on what activities and interactions were allowed in order to reduce the impact of COVID. More information about the history of the alert level changes can be found archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20240223235221/https://covid19.govt.nz/about-our-covid-19-response/history-of-the-covid-19-alert-system/(external link) and of the Traffic Light System archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20240220204357/https://covid19.govt.nz/about-our-covid-19-response/history-of-the-covid-19-protection-framework-traffic-lights/(external link)
Face to face surveying was only able to take place in locations at Alert levels 1 and 2, but not 3 and 4. Face to face surveying also needed to halt at Traffic light setting Red (Dec 2021, 1st introduced), but a form of contactless recruitment, followed by phone/video interviewing was able to be used at Red from late January 2022 onwards, with face to face interviewing able to resume (although with the option of phone/video interviewing still available) at Orange (14 April 2022 onwards) and subsequently. Results will reflect the travel patterns observed when and where surveying could take place.
More information about the Household Travel Survey can be found here
The latest available results from the survey are shown through various visualisations below, or through the other tabs above. Spreadsheet breakdowns for various results, including by mode for regions, gender, age and ethnicity can be found by clicking the cross on the Notes section below, and following the links.