We tend to assume that travel today is fundamentally different from what it was half a century ago. We have easier access to faster forms of transportation, and we expect to be able to move quickly and easily whenever we wish. But a recent overview of travel behavior in England—celebrating 50 years of data from the National Travel Survey (NTS)—shows that while some things have certainly changed, much remains the same.
According to the authors of the report, the most striking change to our travel habits is that “we are traveling further but not more often.” In other words, though the individual trips we take are longer in terms of distance, the number of times we travel has remained much the same over the past 50 years. What’s more, there has been little change in the total time spent traveling, due to faster travel speeds. And the purposes of our trips have changed only slightly: The biggest change has been an increase in the number of journeys we take to escort others.
