Identifying and understanding long-distance travel demand by combining official transport statistics and survey data

While much is known about everyday travel of the German population, long-distance travel is still underreported. The main data source, the national travel survey “Mobility in Germany (MiD)”, cannot simply be used to describe the demand: complex extrapolations and complementary data are necessary to obtain a consistent picture. The presented approach of ‘data fusion’ integrates different data sources to provide the overall long-distance travel demand. The result reveals that almost half of the total transport performance of the residential population in Germany (46 % of passenger kilometers) is accounted for by trips of at least 100 km (one-way distance).