How do people move around in cities and communities - and what can be deduced from it? These are the questions that the "Mobility in Cities - SrV" survey has been investigating regularly for 50 years (SrV = System of Representative Traffic Surveys).

This year is no exception. The traffic survey is carried out for the 12th time already. Throughout Germany, more than 270,000 people in 500 cities and municipalities have been randomly selected to be surveyed on a voluntary basis since the beginning of January.

The Goal

The aim is to regularly collect and analyze important data bases for municipal traffic planning on the basis of a unified survey design. In this way, trends in the field of mobility and its boundary conditions can be compared across cities and municipalities due to the large sample.

The participants represent a cross-section of the population stratum with individual mobility behavior. In addition to the data useful for traffic planning and policy, the mobility behavior under pandemic and climate related aspects as well as the mobility of children, young people, and senior citizens are taken into account.

Background

50 years ago, the first traffic survey of this kind was already carried out in the former GDR with surveying 16 cities, and repeated every five years. As it turned out, the Western German Federal Ministry of Transport became aware of and was interested in the survey findings. 

The scientific management and coordination of the project is in the hands of the Chair of Integrated Transport Planning and Traffic Engineering at the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences “Friedrich List” of the TU Dresden. Following a pan-European invitation to bid, the Leipzig-based market and opinion research institute O.trend GmbH won the contract to conduct the survey.