CSO national travel survey

magicbastarder

anyone else get an email about this? it seems legit, except for two things - they use a date format which would not be one irish people would be overly familiar with, and they've picked an odd day to ask people to report on their travel:

Dear xxxxxx,

Thank you for agreeing to participate in the CSO National Travel Survey (NTS) web app.

The aim of the NTS web app is to record all of your daily travel for a given day, in your case, could you record all of your travel for 2020-01-02.

wench

Sounds dodgy, where would they have gotten your email?

They don't mention any app based survey here https://www.cso.ie/en/surveys/householdsurveys/safetyinformation/
and the last mention of the NTS on their site is for 2016.

I would check with them before filling anything out households@cso.ie

thomasj

magicbastarder wrote: »

anyone else get an email about this? it seems legit, except for two things - they use a date format which would not be one irish people would be overly familiar with, and they've picked an odd day to ask people to report on their travel:

What email address did it come from?

magicbastarder

nts@cso.ie - i did fill out a survey for the CSO before (a household income one, so that could be how they have my email), but i don't recall doing a transport one before now.

just set my spidey senses tingling - a mail shot on new years day, for the 2nd Jan, a day when many people will be on leave, me included, does not seem like an efficient or useful survey.
plus, the date format issue is just a little odd.

magicbastarder

so it's legit:

Hi XXXXXX,


Many thanks for your email of today's date in relation to our National Travel Survey (NTS) 2019.

With reference to your questions, please note that the NTS has been continued over the Christmas and New Year periods as we wish to gather data on all types of journeys (not just the commute to and from work). Essentially it is a survey of the travel behaviour of respondents.

You have been asked to complete this survey by recording your travel for today, Thursday 2nd January 2020.

XXXXX, on behalf of the Central Statistics Office I want to take this opportunity of thanking you for taking part in the National Travel Survey 2019.

magicbastarder

interestingly, you're asked to enter your name and the dummy placeholder used is 'Borris Johnson'.

cdaly_

2020-01-02

This date format is one of the unambiguous ones commonly used in database queries and may have just slipped out into the wild. It's unambiguous in contrast to the
'dd-mm-yyyy' vs 'mm-dd-yyyy' used by european vs USA..

Saudades

I got one of these through the post this week.

I'm going to complete it anyway, but just wondering if they're optional or mandatory by law?

wench

I got one too, it says it's optional.

magicbastarder

forgot to mention; i filled the online form out on the day mentioned, once i knew i would be making no more journeys, and there was a glitch on their backend and i don't know if my return was processed.