Urban Transportation Indicators Fifth Survey Now Available

The Fifth Urban Transportation Indicators (UTI) survey is now available in the Free Resources section of the Transportation Association of Canada (TAC) website.

Building on four previous surveys, this survey is the latest in a series that have, individually and collectively, provided an important picture of transportation behaviour and trends across Canada's 33 largest urban areas.

The Fifth UTI was given a major update and refresh, in order to account for changing issues and new data sources. Key changes include the introduction of new indicators on health and transportation, and on the economic performance of transportation, in a more comprehensive treatment of factors that influence mode choice. Readers are able to make comparisons with 90+ sustainability indicators that were prepared in previous surveys.

The overall goal of the survey program, originally introduced by TAC’s Urban Transportation Council in 1994, was to build a consistent and reliable database about urban transportation and develop indicators for Canadian municipalities and transportation stakeholders. 

The following steps were conducted as part of the survey:

• Established key geography for all metropolitan areas.
• Examined issues associated with Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) and urban units having changing boundaries over time.
• Investigated ways to better account for the geographic variability that exists for many transportation indicators within the largest CMAs.
• Obtained and processed all the higher-level data and commercial sourced data as needed for the UTI study.
• Developed and issued surveys to participating municipalities and managed data collection. In larger urban areas, coordination across many municipalities, agencies and levels of jurisdiction was necessary to ensure data quality and consistency.
• Processed and analyzed all the data, including under a time-series perspective of the new streamlined indicators.

The UTI Survey Database (built in MS Access – 52 MB download), which integrates data from the fifth survey as well as previous surveys, is also available in conjunction with this technical report.

Both the technical report and briefing, which provides an overview of the project and survey results, are available free of charge on the TAC website. These documents can also be downloaded directly from TAC’s interactive Publication Catalogue.

The French version of these documents is currently in production and will be posted as they become available.