The Canadian Vehicle Survey is funded by Transport Canada and undertaken by Statistics Canada, with the cooperation of the Registrars of Motor Vehicles in all Provinces and Territories in providing access to their files of vehicle registrations for sampling purposes. The survey began in 1999, and results for 2000, the first complete calendar year of surveying, were released in August 2001.

The purpose of the survey is to allow Transport Canada to understand developments in national vehicle use, to improve road safety, monitor fuel consumption and deal with the impact of vehicle usage on the environment.

It is the goal of the survey to provide annual estimates of the amount of road travel, broken down by types of vehicle, age and sex of driver, time of day and season. The results are the sole national source of road vehicle use information for researchers and interested members of the public. Previously there has been no reliable, comprehensive source for this information in Canada, even though about ninety percent of all travel in Canada is by road.

Vehicles are selected randomly in each province/territory and a 7-day trip diary is mailed to the owners to record how these vehicles are used over the survey time period. To save money, the number of vehicles sampled is kept to a minimum. Responses are not analysed in any way that identifies individual vehicles - they are only useful when combined with all the other responses. A representative picture is obtained by picking vehicles at random from the official vehicle registration files of each province and territory, and the whole year is covered by picking new vehicles every week.

Once the completed forms are returned, they are combined to build up a profile of the average kilometres for vehicles during the year, then multiplied by the total number of registered vehicles in the country to obtain total kilometres in the year. The profile created from the sample includes average kilometres per vehicle for each day of the week, and each hour within the day, by type of vehicle (car, light truck, heavy truck, bus, etc), by sex and age group of drivers, and by trip purpose.

The recorded number of passengers at the beginning and ending of each trip is used to calculate average vehicle occupancy, which is multiplied by vehicle-kilometres to give the total passenger-kilometres of travel in a year. "Passenger-kilometres" is the main measure used to compare travel by different means of transport - for example the extent of car travel versus travel by plane, train, intercity bus or urban transit.

Transport Canada report on 2000 CVS results:   

Quarterly reports published by Statistics Canada
(all Adobe Acrobat format)

Trip log examples