NTS Analytics - Urban / rural trip split
Back to Resource HubWhat is it?
A dataset showing the split of trips between urban and rural areas, using National Travel Survey data. It highlights how people travel from different starting locations, across modes such as car, public transport, walking and cycling.
How is it useful?
Use it to compare travel patterns between place types and spot where behaviour differs. It helps you test whether schemes will work in urban or rural settings, justify mode shift assumptions, and align proposals with real-world trends when developing business cases and investment plans.
Dataset code
01206
Licence
Open Government Licence 3.0
Limitations
NTS data is based on real-surveyed data and therefore has some limitations. The lowest geography in the data is Unitary Authority and cannot be reported any lower. Due to sample sizes the data is served across all available years and therefore shows an average. Most of the sample exists for car journies and other modes are less well represented. Very short distance active trips are often missed when users are filling out the survey (i.e. trips that are a walk to the corner shop)
Attributions
Cuts of NTS data are licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/) with the following attributions:
Source: Department for Transport. (2024). National Travel Survey, 2002-2023: Special Licence Access. [data collection]. 13th Edition. UK Data Service. SN: 7553, DOI: http://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-7553-13