What proportion of journeys of less than five kilometers do Upper Austrians cover by car? Which climate ticket holders take the train to work? How often do Ottensheim residents go to Linz each week? The 2022 traffic survey, which the state of Upper Austria is conducting in October, is intended to provide answers to questions like these. 40 percent of households in the country are asked to take part in the survey. “The survey is an important basis for setting the course in traffic planning in the coming years. Those who take part help shape it,” said Transport Councilor Günther Steinkellner (FP) on Friday at the presentation of the project.
Basis for public transport offers
The traffic survey has been carried out every ten years since 1982. It serves, for example, as a basis for which public transport offers are set because traffic flows between individual communities. “Due to the large sample, we can break down the results with great accuracy down to the level of municipalities,” says Berthold Pfeiffer, who is responsible for implementation in the state’s overall traffic planning and public transport department. Overall, the mobility development of the past ten years should be made visible in order to enable planning for the coming years.
This is how participation works: From July 25th, about every third household in Upper Austria will receive an information letter intended to encourage participation. There are two ways to do this: either request a paper questionnaire using an answer card or register on a separate online platform. The survey then takes place in October: the participants are asked to document all the routes they travel on a given day. The source and destination, the selected means of transport, the purpose of the trip (i.e. commute to work, leisure trip, etc.) as well as the duration and length of the trip are queried. In addition, data such as driver’s license or climate ticket ownership is collected. The survey is carried out in the individual households on different days of the week in order to depict the entire traffic situation.
Home office is also taken into account
Participation is completely voluntary, but a higher response rate leads to more accurate results and thus a better basis for traffic planning. In order to keep the range of fluctuation as small as possible, the proportion of households surveyed is graded according to the size of the municipality. In a municipality with less than 500 households there is a complete survey, every second household and so on. In Linz, Upper Austria’s largest city, a seventh of the families are finally questioned.
In order to map border traffic, Upper Austria also surveys households in the districts of Amstetten and Waidhofen an der Ybbs in Lower Austria. Salzburg also takes part in the survey, so that there, for example, commuter flows in and out of the Innviertel are also shown.
Current developments are also interesting for the survey. For example, if you don’t travel any distances because you work from home, you can also state that. “The goal is to get an accurate picture of daily traffic behavior,” says Berthold Pfeiffer. Hence the survey period in autumn: “October is the month in which the traffic volume corresponds most closely to the annual average, based on experience,” says Pfeiffer.
Source: Nachrichten
