Introduction

This report presents transport and travel findings from the 2023 Scottish Household Survey.

The Scottish Household Survey (SHS) is an annual survey of the general population in Scotland, carried out since 1999. It aims to collect reliable and up-to-date information on a range of topics through a random sample of people in private residences. It is a voluntary and interviewer-led survey.

The survey covers a number of topics relating to transport and travel, including a ‘travel diary’, which involves respondents recounting the details of all of the journeys they made the day before their survey interview.

Further information on the Scottish Household Survey is provided in the supporting information section.

Interpretation of results

Excel tables have been published in the supporting files to this publication. These include figures for previous years and the relevant table numbers are referred to throughout this publication. The Excel tables include specific results for various sub-groups in the population (e.g. men and women, different age groups).

The Travel Diary is a section of the survey which involves respondents recounting details of all the journeys they made the previous day. A journey can consist of one or more stages. A new stage is defined when there is a change in the form of transport or when there is a change of vehicle requiring a separate ticket.

There are a range of further questions in the SHS about transport and travel and the results of these can be found in the Social Survey tables.

Because of sampling variation, some differences may occur by chance. We use standard statistical tests to examine whether differences are likely to be due to chance. Only differences that are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level are described as differences in the text of this report, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

A lookup table for confidence intervals is included in the accompanying excel files (Confidence _intervals). This can be used in conjunction with the estimates and sample size to give an indication of what inferences can reliably be made from the data. In some cases, where the sample size is below 50 respondents, years have been combined or estimates are not given because they might be unreliable.

In this publication, no comparisons are made between figures for 2020 and 2021 and figures for other years. Due to COVID-19 related changes to how they survey was conducted, the 2020 and 2021 editions of the survey are not considered to be comparable with other years. Further information is provided in the supporting information section.