The papers included in this special issue have been selected among contributions to the 14th International Conference on Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR), held in Windsor in July 2015. The special issue contains five regular papers and one keynote paper.

The regular papers are in some form all about data collection and survey design. The first three papers are effectively about data collection, the challenges and the opportunities therein; while the first two papers are more focused on survey design, the third paper demonstrates how to exploit repeated cross sectional datasets to improve temporal transferability of demand models. The fourth paper is ostensibly focussed on the impacts of e-shopping on personal shopping mobility, though fundamentally it demonstrates the value of multi-day travel diaries and of combining travel diaries with data on activity participation. The fifth and last research paper in this special issue examines well-being in the context of residential location choice, and the collection of data through appropriate surveys.

The first paper, by Schmidt et al., gives an in-depth explanation of the challenges faced in surveys which include multi-day travel reporting, expenditure and online behaviour, as well as stated preference (SP) components on mode and route choice, and the investigation of daily activity scheduling and mobility tool ownership. Such detailed surveys provide hugely interesting insights, allowing us to explore the effect of large changes in generalized transport costs not only on time allocation, mode choice and activity travel patterns but also on mobility tool ownership in the long term and the suppressed demand from an activity-based perspective. They can however also be beset by issues of drop-out and poor response quality, and findings in this paper show the issues of using high incentives and over-representing subpopulations, as well as the importance of considering fatigue effects.

Auschauer at al. present an innovative survey to simultaneously capture information on three important processes: time assigned to travel activity, time assigned to non-travel activity such as leisure and personal care, and the monetary budget assigned for constrained and unconstrained goods. In this respect, they combine three survey techniques (travel survey, time use survey and consumer expenditure survey) into one. Results illustrate a more reliable dataset that can be used in travel behaviour models.

Salem and Habib present the advantage of using repeated cross-sectional datasets for the temporal transferability of activity scheduling models. In particular, they explore temporal transferability and demonstrate an approach to develop a meta-model which makes it possible to account for temporal evolution in activity scheduling. As illustrated, the use of repeated cross-sectional datasets in this manner improves temporal transferability, and guarantees a more reliable tool for travel demand forecasting.

The fourth paper in this special issue investigates the effect of e-shopping on the different stages of personal shopping mobility, from browsing to purchasing of products. Factor analysis techniques are employed to categorise different groups with specific browsing and selection behaviour. Multivariate linear regression models are employed to analyse a 3-day travel diary dataset of shopping trips in order to understand whether e-shopping influences trip distances. Findings show that e-shopping does significantly influence non-grocery shopping trips while this influence is not significant for grocery shopping trips.

By combining ideas from psychology and transport studies, Bhattacharyya et al. discuss the design and implementation of two types of interventions (focalism and visualisation) to encourage a more rational residential choice and consequently lead to more sustainable travel behaviour. The survey was conducted before and after the residential choice, and the authors find that, depending on the interventions, people make more sustainable decisions and their happiness increases.

The special issue concludes with a keynote paper in which Mokhtarian gives an overview of methodologies to assess how travel affects well-being. The concept of subjective well-being is clarified and different types of conceptual models that analyse the influence of transportation on subjective well-being are reviewed.

We believe these six papers give an idea of the diverse set of topics discussed at IATBR 2015.