Developing the Digital Alternative Mobility Monitor (DMM)

Position Paper, August 2025

Simone Fari & Gijs Mom

Introduction

At the T2M conference in Eindhoven in early November 2025, a transnational team of mobility experts from North America and Europe will introduce the Digital Alternative Mobility Monitor (DMM), a shared online platform dedicated to capturing and exchanging practical insights into the urban and extra-urban mobility transition. Unlike traditional initiatives that rely solely on quantitative indices, the DMM is designed to collect detailed narrative accounts of innovative practices—stories that illustrate real-world shifts from conventional mobility to more sustainable and socially just alternatives, as well as a limited amount of quantitative indicators of the transformation towards more sustainable and just mobilities. Thus, DMM monitors the pulse of changing mobility cultures.

The platform’s core innovation lies in its open, inclusive structure. It invites a diverse range of stakeholders—from researchers, urban architects, and mobility planners to public administrators, transport managers, and everyday road users and non-users—to contribute their experiences, thus co-constructing a digital imaginary of the transition over the course of many years and in a multitude of countries and regions. By documenting and discussing mobility practices, the DMM aims to showcase a wide spectrum of sustainable mobility solutions, without limiting its focus to any single one. Instead, it welcomes all narratives that illustrate the emergence of a new mobility paradigm that is both ecologically sustainable and socially equitable. The Dutch mobility documentation centre NCAD is the initiator of this project.

Constructing DMM

At this moment, the preparations for the actual construction of the DMM are in full flow, undertaken by dr.ing. Gijs Mom of NCAD/Eindhoven University of Technology and prof.dr. Simone Fari of Granada university. The results of these preparations will be discussed with most members of the network mentioned below, and other interested guests, during a meeting one day before the T2M conference, on 4 November.

First of all, we started to set up a world-wide network, at the moment consisting of the following persons (and still growing): representatives from Belgium (Donald Weber), Bulgaria (Lyubomir Pozharliev), France (Étienne Faugier, Mathieu Flonneau), Italy (Paolo Giardullo), Germany (Hans Liudger Dienel), Greece (Aristotle Tympas), the Netherlands (Fons Alkemade, Jan-Bart Broertjes, Arjen Schepen, Marc van Doorne, Gijs Mom), Portugal (Luísa Coelho Sousa, Hugo Pereira), Spain (Simone Fari), Sweden (Per Lundin) and the United States (Peter Norton). During the coming months we intend to use Spain as a ‘guinea pig’, in order to identify the major problems.

Second, we defined the following functionalities of DMM:

• PULSE: this functionality encompasses an annual survey (quantitative data collection) of national panels. The panels are so-called ‘vanguard panels’: they are not representative of the national population, but are in their structure a reflection of the main stakeholders of the mobility transition: motorists hesitating to change their mobility behaviour, EV drivers, dedicated cyclists and pedestrians, policy makers, representatives of industry and mobility associations.
  
  Questions still to be decided:
  -the size of the panels (our suggestion: 2,000 organized locally)
  -how to select panel members?
  -do we need a proto-survey for the selection process?
  -how to arrange the survey results?
  -how to organize finance?
  -first survey in 2026?
  
  
• STORY: narratives, forming a dynamic forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices. Panel members will be invited to share and discuss their innovative practices, creating a dynamic forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices.
  
  Questions still to be decided:
  -one language (English), or a language per country, with translation tools?
  -define one theme per year? Who does this?
  -how to organize? Possibilities: organized like H-Net or run by users themselves?
  
  
• BRIDGE: mediation between scholars and practitioners on the basis of research reports. The aim of this functionality is mediation between theory and practice: Serving as a connective hub, the platform and its researchers will bridge the gap between academic research and practical implementation, benefiting both scholars and practitioners by fostering a dialogue that translates theoretical insights into actionable strategies and feeds back such strategies into theory.
  Questions still to be decided:
  -do we need an archive function? Storing crucial scientific articles with limited access? If so: who manages this?
  
  
• NEWS: automated news platform about transition experiences worldwide. The idea here is to provide an automated news service; for this we need a tool that selects items from the web on the basis of keywords.

Third, we investigated the possibilities of effectively building the platform and made a first estimate of its costs with some friendly computer programmers. For the moment we estimate the costs to be 15,000 Euros for the realization, and 5,000 Euros for annual maintenance and repair both at the maximum. We are currently investigating the possibilities of subsidy and sponsoring in the Netherlands.

Fourth, we started a series of online discussions with the steering group-in-the-making, focussing on the project’s weaknesses to be avoided and advantages to be sought.

Fifth, we intend to develop a demo and a business plan for the meetings of 4 and 5 November.

Some historical background: The problems of panels

We are certainly not the first coming up with the idea of setting up mobility panels. They are often household-based and aimed at monitoring details of mobility (often car use) over time. They thus have the advantage of giving a picture of historical change, often enriched with interviews or diaries that inform about the lengths and purpose of trips. In order to be statistically reliable panel members have to be randomly selected in such a way that they are representative for a (mostly national) population. Apart from some theoretical particularities, their empirical problems are mostly concentrated on what experts call attrition and mortality: the substantial loss of participants after every ‘wave’, especially if such waves are far apart. This can amount to one third of the members, a phenomenon which often is combated by offering ‘incentives’ (often participation in a lottery).[1]

Longitudinal panel surveys date from the 1980s, the consumer panel in Cardiff being one of the first, followed by other well-known studies of Puget Sound (USA) in 1989 and Santiago de Chile in 2010.[2]

In the Netherlands, the National Mobility Panel (NMP) exists since 1984 and was first organized to investigate the effects of a new public transport fare policy. During the first wave 1764 households were involved; during the second wave, held later in the same year, the remaining 68 % of the first-wave responders were involved. Both waves resulted in the collection of data from 2561 individuals of twelve years and older, who all kept a seven-day diary.[3] Since then, panel surveys have become a mature niche in transport planning circles.[4]

Since 2013, the MPN (MobiliteitsPanel Nederland, The Netherlands Mobility Panel) is hold on an annual basis to enable so-called longitudinal travel data collection, to collect “trip and trip stage data.”[5] The MNP is fully web-based and is financed through KIM (Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis) as part of the Dutch Ministry of Transport. Next to this, another initiative was approved by the Ministry to be executed by one of the oldest Dutch consultancy bureaus, Goudappel & Coffeng, its founders belonging to the first critical generation of traffic engineers pleading for a moderation of the Americanized urban traffic planning in the Netherlands by proposing pedestrian zones, woonerfs and combinations of private and public transport.[6]

Recently other stakeholders with European funding have ventured into the panel survey domain, for instance a Belgian initiative aimed at analysing bicycle use in seven European cities, surveying more than 10,000 respondents between November 2014 and November 2016, resulting in the conclusion that bicycle use may be able to decrease car use. 1849 participants kept diaries (only 22 % of them without access to a car, male and female respondents equally represented), most of them highly educated, their main mobility modes being cycling and public transport.[7] It was this survey that formed the inspiration for the first-mentioned functionality of our DMM proposal. We aim, however, for a much less sophisticated and costly alternative characterized by the following differences:

• Our panels are not representative for a population, but perhaps for a mobility avant garde;
• They are not our main goal, but should function as quantitative support of our qualitative, narrative functionality; we are after stories!

Stakeholders

DMM is built to document a periodical discourse between several stakeholders: road users, non-users, scholars studying mobility alternatives and mobility justice, policy makers, industry. [this should be further developed]. The big question at the moment is how to bring this about in such a way that it supports the mobility transition.

Deliverables

Each year DMM will self-produce the following deliverables:

• PULSE 26, PULSE 27, etc.
  An annual report on the results of the survey of the national panels, consisting of graphs and a brief commentary formulated by the steering group.
  
• STORYBOOK 26, STORYBOOK 27, etc.
  An annual anthology of the stories sent to DMM by members of the national panels and the wider public.
  
• ANALYSES
  New scholarship on the mobility transition (partially) based on the input from Pulse and Storybook.

Planning (further detailing necessary)

After November 2025:

• Consolidate the international network through the recruitment of panels. More countries to be included?
• Build the platform.
• Plan (formulate) recruitment ‘exam’ of panel members.
• Organize the first survey (2026?).

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[1] Dirk Zumkeller et al., “Panel Surveys,” in: Peter Stopher and Cheryl Stecher (eds.), Travel Survey Methods: Quality and Future Directions (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006) 363-398.

[2] Neil Wrigley, Cliff Guy, Richard Dunn and Larry O’Brien, “The Cardiff Consumer Panel: Methodological Aspects of the Conduct of a Long-Term Panel Survey,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10 (1985) No. 1, 63-76; Elaine Murakami and W.T. Watterson, “The Puget Sound Transportation Panel after two waves,” Transportation 19 (1992) 141-158; María Francisca Yáñez, Patricio Mansilla and Juan de Dios Ortúzar, “The Santiago Panel: measuring the effects of implementing Transantiago,” Transportation 37 (2010) 125-149.

[3] Thomas F. Golob and Leo van Wissen (Bureau Goudappel Coffeng) and J.M. Golob (Ministry f Transpoort), “A panel-data analysis of the dynamics of transport mode use.” Proceedings of Seminar L held at the PTRC Summer Annual Meeting, University of Sussex, from 15 – 18 July 1985, Volume P 268 (n.p. [London]: PTRC Education and Research Services on behalf of Planning and Transport Research and Computing (International) Co., 1985); also see L.J.G. van Wissen and H.J. Meurs, “The Dutch mobility panel: Experiences and evaluation,” Transportation 16 (1989) 99-119.

[4] Ryuichi Kitamura, “A Panel Analysis of Household Car Ownership and Mobility,” Proc. Of JSCE No. 383/IV-7 (Infrastructure and Management) (July 1987) 13-27; Ryuichi Kitamura and Piet H.L. Bovy, “Analysis of Attrition Biases and Trip Reporting Errors for Panel Data,” Trransportation Research Part A 21A (1987) No. 4/5, 287-302.

[5] Sascha Hoogendoorn-Lanser, Nina T.W. Schaap and Marie-José OldeKalter, “The

Netherlands Mobility Panel: An innovative design approach for web-based longitudinal travel data collection,” Transportation Reseacrh Procedia 11 (2015) 311-329, here: 311.

[6] Marcus Popkema, “Van verkeerstechniek en integrale planning; De ontwikkeling van het vak Verkeerskunde in Nederland” (diss. Eindhoven University of Technology, 2013).

[7] Christian Brand, Thomas Götsch et al., “The climate change mititgation impacts of active travel: Evidence from a longitudinal panel study in seven European cities,” Global Environmental Change 67 (2021) 102224.