About National Household Travel Survey (NHTS)

For nearly four decades, the National Household Travel Survey, (NHTS) has served as the nation's inventory of personal travel. It has been the only national authoritative source for personal travel behavior that addressed who, when, where, how and why the US population travels as it does. It has hosted an array of trip-making characteristics such as the purpose of a trip, mode used for a trip, distance of each trip, time, day of the week and month of the year, number of people on a trip, and much more. It has also provided data for trend analysis. For example in the most recent 2009 series it included trend items such as internet shopping and home deliveries, telecommuting and flex time to work, use of tolls and interstate, and hybrids.

In January of 2009, the FHWA released its latest 2009 NHTS public data sets. The data contains over 150,000 Household interviews with approximately 320,000 person interviews representing approximately 385 billion trips when expanded to the population. All this data can be found at the NHTS home web site at http://nhts.ornl.gov/