National Traffic Safety Survey

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation is seeking approval of this information collection request (ICR) to allow NHTSA to conduct six information collections as part of a new voluntary research effort titled the National Traffic Safety Survey (NTSS). The purpose of the surveys is to obtain up-to-date information about road user attitudes and behaviors related to motor vehicle safety. The respondents will be members of the public that are contacted through nationally representative sampling methods. Participation by respondents will be voluntary. Each of the surveys will contain a set of core questions that will be asked across all surveys and a combination of two additional sections consisting of questions related to seat belts, distracted driving, new vehicle technologies, or traffic safety and traffic safety enforcement. This collection only asks respondents to report their answers; there are no record-keeping costs to respondents. Each survey will have a combination of two of the four topic areas, and the order of the topic areas will be varied. The NTSS is intended to collect approximately 6,001 surveys, or 1,000 of each type of survey (with 500 surveys collected for each order in which the additional topic sections would appear). NHTSA intends to conduct a pilot of the survey first with approximately 250 respondents, followed by a full administration of the survey to 6,001 respondents, and a possible follow-up administration of the survey two years later with 6,001 respondents. For purposes of this ICR, NHTSA assumes that the survey will be conducted twice, as well as the pilot being conducted once. Accordingly, the estimates for the three-year approval are based on an average annual burden based on these targets, with an estimate that there will be approximately 681 annual respondents for each of the six information collections. The contractor conducting this information collection is ICF International, Inc. ICF’s IRB will review and approve this data collection prior to fielding. ICF’s IRB meets all federal requirements in 45 CFR 46, is registered with the Office for Human Research Protections, and has a Federalwide Assurance (FWA00002349). NHTSA will use the information from this collection to produce a technical report that presents the results of the survey, as well as a dataset that does not contain any personally identifiable information (PII). The technical report will provide aggregate (summary) statistics and tables as well as the results of statistical analyses of the information, but it will not include any PII. The technical report will be shared with State highway safety offices, local governments, policymakers, researchers, educators, advocates, and others who may wish to use the data from this survey to support their work. NHTSA estimates the total annual burden associated with this ICR to be 2,046 hours and $0.

The latest form for National Traffic Safety Survey expires 2027-12-31 and can be found here.

Survey Form 1805 - Modules 1 & 2

Federal Enterprise Architecture: Transportation - Ground Transportation

Review document collections for all forms, instructions, and supporting documents - including paper/printable forms.