Swiss Mobility Panel
research areas
timeframe
2020 - present
contact
mob@ethz.ch
Overview
The mobility of the Swiss population, measured in km/day, has been increasing steadily for years. This is pushing both public and private transportation capacities to their limits. At the same time, Switzerland will fall far short of its 2020 climate protection targets, and while emissions from the transport sector have hardly reduced at all, it seems very difficult to find the necessary political majorities for drastic measures.
Against this backdrop, the Swiss Mobility Panel explores public opinion dynamics in Switzerland in relation to mobility preferences and behavior, changes therein, and linkages to preferences and behavior in other policy realms.
Around 9,500 randomly selected individuals participate in the Swiss Mobility Panel and answer these and related questions. Having started in October 2020, the Swiss Mobility Panel is an ongoing research project, a collaboration between the research group International Political Economy and Environmental Politics and the Institute for Transport Planning and Systems at the Institute of Science, Technology and Policy of ETH Zurich.
Method
The Swiss Mobility Panel is based on a representative sample of the Swiss resident population over 18 years of age, provided by the harmonized population registry of the Swiss Federal Statistical Agency (Bundesamtes für Statistik, BFS/SRPH). This sample includes the full resident population, Swiss and non-Swiss nationalities. Respondents are invited with a letter in the main language of their municipality. The survey can be taken electronically in German, French, Italian or English via an online platform. The project is a panel study, i.e. the same persons are surveyed repeatedly. The project conducts two survey rounds per year.
Background and Motivation
Understanding what the public thinks, what they do and what changes they want to see happen is an important component for social and political life. Social surveys provide an excellent source of such data, helping people, business, governments and policy makers better understand our mobile lives. Currently, there are more limited surveys in the field of mobility studies, none of which follow the same individuals over a longer period of time (“within subject” design). Accordingly, the Swiss Mobility Panel helps fill this knowledge gap, providing insight on how, why, and in which ways people use different mobility tools, and ways in which they would like to see this change in the future.
Team
Principal Investigators
Project Coordinators
Decision Science Laboratory Coordinator
Project Team
- Patricia Wäger
- Paola Gagliardi
- Jan Linder
- Patricia Maissen
- Hanna Pahls
- Elea Seidlmann