Travel surveys

Do you need to understand where and how people are travelling?

Kobla wants to make it as easy as possible to conduct a travel survey, whether you are a company that needs a better understanding of how your employees travel to and from work, or whether you are a municipality or a research institute that needs detailed travel patterns that can be further analyzed in GIS solutions and other mapping solutions.

We offer 3 options, depending on your needs:

  • For companies: Do you want better insight into how your employees travel to/from work and want to implement measures to further reduce emissions? Kobla Environmental Accounting may be just what you need, it’s a tool that efficiently conducts a travel survey on all your employees and calculates environmental accounts for employee travel.
  • For municipalities or research institutes: Do you need detailed travel patterns? The DigitalTRS app helps you execute digital travelsurveys efficiently and cost effective. Read more.
  • Cyclists: Do you work to facilitate cyclists or research where and how people cycle? Or are you working to improve road safety for cyclists? Kobla has a partnership with See.Sense, which has a smart bike light. The light automatically detects where accidents and near-accidents occur and shares this in an insight solution. Over time, this not only provides a unique picture of where people are cycling, but also detailed insight into which areas should be prioritized in safety work. Read more.

DigitalTRS

Travel surveys and traffic counting made easier

DigitalTRS is an app that allows planning departments, research projects or consultancies to efficiently conduct travel habit surveys and traffic counting assignments. Participating citizens download the app and allow their movements to be logged, whether on foot, by bike, car, bus or train.

The result is far richer data than static sensors alone can offer, and thus a significantly better basis for analysis. DigitalTRS provides insight into the entire journey, starting point, destination and route choice, not just the passing of a starting point. Furthermore, DigitalTRS logs the traveler’s speed on all parts of the journey and the weather at the time of departure. Users can also answer surveys, both at initial installation and during the period. See more details here.

Benefits of DigitalTRS

  • User privacy is safeguarded (can easily delete private journeys)
  • Intuitive correction of journeys
  • Support for entering many types of vehicles (which can be measured)
  • Rewarding, nudging and gamification are used to get participants to voluntarily participate
  • Lower cost and higher accuracy
  • Support for sending messages to respondents.
  • Support for deviation reporting with text, location and images as part of the survey, e.g. winter maintenance.

Smart bike sensors

Mapping cyclists and where accidents occur

Smart bike sensors

Increased numbers of electric bikes and scooters are good for the environment, but they have also led to an increase in accidents. To reduce the number of accidents, better data is needed to understand where and how accidents occur.

To help municipalities with this, Kobla has partnered with UK-based See.Sense to use their unique data collection and insight solution that maps where and how people cycle. With its unique technology, See.Sense is the market leader for this type of mapping.

The solution consists of a smart bicycle light that logs the cyclist’s position, speed, orientation and acceleration several hundred times a second. This information is analyzed and provides a detailed picture of not only exactly where cyclists are riding, but also of road conditions and whether the cyclist has been involved in an accident or near-accident. This information is shared in an insight solution for further analysis and action planning.

Applications:

  • Winter cyclists: Map where people cycle in winter and where accidents occur. Use this data to improve winter maintenance and improve infrastructure and signage.
  • Electric scooters: There are just too many nasty accidents involving scooters. At the same time, they have become an important part of the sustainable transportation mix. Use the smart sensors to map in detail where the scooters are and what kind of accident situations they are involved in.
  • Travel habit surveys: Combine the sensors from See.Sense with data from the DigitalTRS app and get data with a unique level of detail on the overall travel patterns of cyclists.

Want to hear more about the solutions?

Fill out the form and we will get in touch with you!

What are my options to count and survey traffic?

There are many ways to do this. Traffic counts are typically conducted at static points, and the count is either manual (conducted by a person) or automatic (sensor). Counts can provide an accurate picture of the traffic at a point, but it is expensive and time-consuming to conduct counts over a large area. Sensors can provide a good result, but the different types of sensors have different accuracy and different sensitivity to weather and time of day. They can also have privacy challenges.

A travel survey is traditionally conducted as an interview, typically over the phone (CATI) or by the respondent filling out a web form (CAWI). It is also possible to conduct a travel habit survey using an app on mobile phones. Kobla’s DigitalTRS is an example of such an app.

What is the advantage of using a See.Sense sensor?

Capturing travel patterns using your mobile phone is cost-effective, but it also has some challenges. Mobile phones come in many varieties, and different phones will give different results. Some cell phones also have aggressive power saving, which contributes to inaccurate measurements. See.Sense has dedicated sensors that measure position, acceleration many hundreds of times per second. This provides a completely different level of detail and resolution than is possible to achieve with a mobile phone-based solution.