What does it involve?

The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) and numerous regional partners are investigating mobility in Germany. This requires information on the mobility behaviour of a representative selection of households and persons throughout Germany.

The study is being jointly conducted by the infas Institute for Applied Social Sciences, the Institute for Transport Research at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and IVT Research.

Your information is important

Our society is more than ever a mobile society. Whether on foot, by bike, by car, bus, train or plane: mobility shapes our everyday lives. However, people’s needs are different.

We are asking randomly selected households for information about their trips on a particular day, as well as some household and personal characteristics. This is the only way we can evaluate, for example, whether younger people are mobile in a different manner to older people. Your information will help us to paint a complete picture of everyday mobility in Germany.

How does it work?

First, we’d like some information about your household. This will take less than five minutes. You will then receive documents for a specific reporting date. This relates to all trips that you and the members of your household have made that entire day, whether made on foot, by bike, by public transport or in your own car. Even if you haven’t made any trips at all that day, we will still need some information from you. This will also only take a few minutes.

The two-stage method is necessary to enable the survey of the reporting date to be conducted precisely for your household. You will then have completed the survey.

Your reporting date

We will notify you of your reporting date. It will be selected using random statistical procedures.

If you didn’t leave the house that day, you cannot simply choose another day. We want to depict mobility as it really is – and people aren’t always on the move.

Thus, you cannot swap your reporting date for another date.

Why your household?

The study is based on a random selection of households by region and city and the persons living in them. The participation of the selected households is so important because we cannot just ask anyone – a representative extra-polation would not be possible in that case.

The survey is also being conducted in your region. Many cities and federal states are participating in it. In this manner, the project provides results for practice-oriented traffic planning.

The history of the study

This traffic survey has been in existence since 1976. Since then, data on the use of means of transport and everyday mobility has been collected on a regular basis. The last survey was conducted in 2017 and is now being up-dated.

Participate because ...

• You will be helping with traffic planning for all traffic participants – whether you travel on foot, by bike or on public transport.
• You will be helping to ensure that taxpayers' money is used in the right places.
• You will be assisting the state in securing the mobility of the future for its citizens.
• You have been randomly selected from the citizens of your region and can-not be replaced.