How to expand sustainable public transportation? First ask 30,000+ residents

The Helsinki Regional Transportation Authority (HSL) operates in Finland's capital area, serving a population of 1.3 million residents with rail, bus, bikeshare, and even ferry services. The region has ambitious carbon reduction goals, which call for ambitiously high-ridership public transit. 

But how does a transportation authority make a massive boost to ridership, while working within the realities of limited public funding? HSL's answer: more satisfied, loyal customers. And that means truly, broadly understanding their current and potential customers.

To develop this new level of understanding, HSL assembled a small team with expertise in public participation, communications, transportation planning, and research, along with our consultants from Maptionnaire. Based on insights and data from over 30,000 current and potential customers, HSL is now ready to develop and target their sustainable transportation services even better.

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So why did they do things differently this time? How did they reach so many respondents? And what kind of results did they get? HSL's participation specialist, Janni Honkavaara, shares the must-know details on the project – read on!

Flip the process: Ask first

For years, HSL has prioritized high-quality community engagement. When planning public transport route services they would usually start with a development idea, then engage communities to clarify the project details and mobility needs. "Usually, first comes the project and then we start to involve our customers in planning," Janni explains. Previous mobility surveys like these have supported specific projects, but the results don't generalize across the whole HSL service area. 

Facing the system-wide goal to massively increase ridership, they needed something big. Impactful. So HSL decided on a flipped approach: First comes community engagement and other customer insight data, which then helps steer and prioritize specific development projects. A comprehensive understanding of people's mobility needs is now the starting point for future development projects.

You cannot grow and you cannot develop if you don't know what the people need... Now we are really doing something for their needs.

Janni Honkavaara, Participation Specialist, Helsinki Regional Transportation Authority (HSL)

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How to reach 30,000+ people

HSL needed an extensive customer understanding from across their operating region, so they hoped for 20,000 responses. When over 30,000 responses rolled in, they knew they'd done something right. Here are some key takeaways:

• Since the Helsinki region has excellent internet literacy and access, they chose a digital questionnaire to reach as many residents as possible.
• With help from Maptionnaire's consultants, they designed a concise and engaging map-based questionnaire – or maptionnaire – and tested it ahead of time. For more on survey design, check out our advice for designing community engagement surveys. 
• The region is linguistically diverse, so they translated the questions and promotional materials into the most common local languages: Finnish, Swedish, and English
• Most importantly, they involved their communications specialists from the start, promoting the maptionnaire in social media, customer channels, and local government channels. While responses were coming in, they strategically focused outreach to areas that lacked responses.
• Finally, they invested in their reputation of meaningful and transparent engagement by showcasing results on their project webpage (currently only in Finnish), made using Maptionnaire's Webpage Builder. 

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→ See also our seven tips for increasing participation in planning

Quantitative and qualitative results

There are also useful sources of data besides directly asking the public. For example, HSL tracks ticket sales, bus occupancy, and overall has good knowledge about their customers and own operations. But when looking ahead, planning new developments, and growing ridership, HSL's planners needed more – they needed to know what mobility patterns exist outside the public transit system and why those mobility patterns exist. 

It was a quantitative survey, but there was also a qualitative understanding in the data, so we got the best of both worlds

Janni Honkavaara, Participation Specialist, Helsinki Regional Transportation Authority (HSL)

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Do some people prefer driving because of the HSL's ticket price, bus routes, or something else? How do they feel about transferring between modes, like biking, walking, driving, and public transit? By linking qualitative and quantitative data, the Maptionnaire platform generated useful knowledge about people's willingness to change. 

Unique, place-based results 

The results are unlike anything you'll find in a best-practices manual. There's no uniform conclusions across the whole region. "Everyone's different and people have different needs," Janni reflects, "After this survey, we know different areas where we have problems and different areas where we are doing a really good job." The Maptionnaire results provided clear, spatial data to guide future development.

Summary

1. The Helsinki Regional Transportation Authority (HSL) engaged 30,000+ residents online with a well-designed and well-campaigned maptionnaire (map-based questionnaire)
2. They collected quantitative geospatial data about journeys, destinations, and modes of transportation
3. They also collected qualitative geospatial data about motivations and preferences, revealing opportunities to convert journeys to public transit
4. This data guides development projects that will increase HSL's base of loyal, satisfied customers
5. HSL is on-track to develop their sustainable regional transportation system!