Translink’s 2011 trip diaries show more travellers making more trips

Translink’s recently-released 2011 Trip Diary Survey, a study of travel patterns based on reports from 20,000 Metro Vancouver households, shows trips increased 9.2 percent to more than six million trips between 2008 and 2011.

That’s growing pressure for transit that transportation decision-makers will have to confront with a new Translink investment program, because car is still king in Metro except in Vancouver, where car trips make up about 40 percent of the total.

In fact, car use remains relatively stable across the region, staying at 57 percent of total trips since counts began in 1994. Transit trips have grown from 10 percent of trips in 1994 to 14 percent in 2011, but make up 22 percent of trips in Vancouver.

An expanding population is growing that number, but each traveller is also taking more trips, up to 2.77 trips on average per day in 2011 from 2.68 in the previous survey.