Crowdsourcing and Visual Research Methodologies to Promote Data Collection for Sustainable Mobility Planning

This paper aims to present and compare two methodologies in order to gather data from residents and visitors about their mobility behavior in the urban environment: crowdsourcing and visual research. These methodologies were used in two Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) in the medium-sized cities Kozani and Drama in Greece. Public input proves to be efficient in recognizing problems, proposing priorities and describing detailed proposals towards achieving desired aims. Results show that the issues that were recorded through the applications of visual research were also perceived by the inhabitants, through the ideas they proposed. It was also found that residents are focusing on concrete proposals, mostly realistic, sometimes presenting a specific spatial reference. On the other hand, public participation in the crowdsourcing platform was low. Combining the two methodologies proves to be effective towards raising public input validity.