In the public perception, the traffic environment has deteriorated over the last few years. Despite that, no attempt has been made until now to carry out a scientific survey of the construct of the traffic environment among the population at large. In order to fill this gap, the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) has commissioned infas with the subcontractor IAPA Research to develop a set of instruments that can be used in future to carry out regular surveys on the traffic environment in Germany. The traffic environment is hereby understood as the way road users interact with each other. The ‘traffic environment’ is thereby interpreted as a subjectively experienced factor. It includes, in short, the perception and evaluation of interactions between road users, and is distinguished from terms such as ‘traffic safety culture’ and ‘transport culture’. During the development of the instruments, it was necessary to examine whether and how it would be possible to draw on public statistics and other data from public authorities. Secondly, the project involved creating and testing a questionnaire that can be used to measure people’s subjective experience of road transport and of the traffic environment. The evaluation of public data pools revealed that these, in their current form, are only suitable in a limited way or not at all in an evaluation of the traffic environment. This relates to the fact that the legal or other framework conditions may have changed, or unforeseen events are influencing the measurement accuracy, with the result that an evaluation of a trend is not possible. Another reason is that the data of public authorities is, in some cases, not gathered for the whole of Ger-many, but only at special check/measurement points, which means that it is not possible to draw conclusions about the whole of Germany. In addition, a questionnaire was developed that can be used to survey perceptions of the traffic environment among the population. These questions were tested in a representative study. A reduced questionnaire instrument and an index based on that can now be used to regularly survey opinions of the traffic environment among the population. The recommendation is to carry this out once every three years using a sample size of 3,000 respondents. Such a sample size would make it possible to gain reliable measurements of change over time and to consider subgroups of the population, e.g. based on age, region or other characteristics. Objective data such as speed and distance measurements or other similar indicators have, after intensive review and consideration, not been included in this concept. The decisive factor behind this decision was the fact that only very selective measurements are available at present, and no easily interpretable time series are available. If these are to contribute – in addition to the survey data – to a reliable assessment of the development of the traffic environment, it will be necessary to design suitable approaches or develop existing processes. We therefore recommend that the objective data can only be used for the interpretation of the traffic environment if the data has been reliably operationalised and can be compared over time. (Author/publisher)
Abstract