Today, transportation surveys are essential to identify complete travel chains, as automatic counting devices, cameras and other recent technologies only cover a portion of one’s journeys. Ask yourself, do you still want to rely on the following when it comes to the quality of your transportation service?
– Commuters’ memory
– Decreasing questionnaire response rates
– High survey conduction costs
If the answer is “no”, let us explain why you shouldn’t worry about this anymore.
The big challenge is that traditional transportation surveys completely rely on respondents’ memory. It is a problem as not only do participants forget what happened during a given day, but they also have a false memory of past events. This is especially the case on short distance journeys, which have not decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic and are crucial to understanding how to create 15-minute cities.
Additionally, the more participants’ memories vanish without a chance of being retrieved, the less trustful the driven conclusions can be.
Imagine a puzzle, which doesn’t have a single missing piece.

Here is where big data obtained by our technologies like while-label survey app or Software development Kit (SDK), integrated into existing apps, come into play. They fully eliminate retrospective memory bias otherwise present in traditional transportation survey methods. MOTIONTAG’s mobility monitoring technology never misses out when an individual travels: not only does it know exactly, by the second, the circumstances of transportation service usage, but it also tells how passengers behave before and after using public transport.
When the data is accurate for all the observations, what if the respondents simply drop out? With traditional data collection methods, some respondents might feel tired of answering repetitive questions on how they commuted over a long period. They might then drop out and return later, or never come back again.
With our mobility monitoring technology, the risk of a drop-out is also minimised in a blink of an eye. Once downloaded, the app doesn’t have to be opened ever again. It collects data every time a respondent moves for as long as the survey analysis lasts without a single day missed or forgotten.
Moreover, our SDKs or white-label app can offer continuous user incentives such as rewards for green transportation behaviour.
Imagine having the same sample size for the whole duration of a transportation survey.

And finally, imagine not wasting time and resources on data recording and transcription. But instead, saving it for quality analysis. Here too, MOTIONTAG’s technology offers support.
The absence of passengers’ memory and response bias challenges, together with cost reduction is not an unfeasible goal for our customers, but an everyday research reality.
Experience it yourself: http://landing.motion-tag.com/mobilityanalysis
MOTIONTAG provides insights into more than 80 simple and aggregated mobility indicators. Moreover, our technology is already being used as a basis for mobility data collection for GfK, BVG, SBB, Swisscom, Infas, and ETH Zurich transportation surveys.
“In addition to maintaining proven procedures and techniques, Infas systematically develops and tests new survey methods. MOTIONTAG’s technology is one of the most interesting new tools for mobility surveys that enrich our existing mix of survey methods. For the respondents, mobility transportation surveys can quickly become complex. Therefore these surveys have usually only covered a single day. New, digital survey methods simplify data collection and facilitate access for young, technology-oriented target groups. Results are produced faster at a competitive price level.
MOTIONTAG’s technology convinces with high precision and fast data availability. Integrating this technology in our market research app gave us the possibility to collect better data for longer time frames in an economical and customer-friendly way.”
– Robert Follmer – Head of Mobility and Regional Research at Infas
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