Results of the travel survey for Itäkeskus, Puotila and Mellunmäki

We conducted a travel survey for Itäkeskus, Puotila and Mellunmäki in November 2021 and received in total 3,017 responses to the survey.

Many thanks to all respondents! The responses provide us with important information and help us develop bus services in East Helsinki.

The open-ended responses where respondents were able to express their views and experiences of public transport in their own words were particularly important. Over the past few years, we have received little feedback on bus services in East Helsinki and no specific issues have been raised.

Here you can read more about the survey results and what we are planning to do.

Ratings given by respondents on a scale of 1 to 5. Two thirds of the respondents gave a rating of 4 or 5. Slightly over a fifth of the respondents gave a rating of 1 or 2.

Most of the respondents were satisfied with public transport services

The respondents were mainly very or fairly satisfied with the current public transport services in the area.

The most satisfied respondents who gave high ratings (4 or 5) live in Kontula, Itäkeskus, Vesala and Myllypuro. Respondents living in Kurkimäki and Kivikko gave the poorest ratings.

Respondents gave the current public transport services an average rating of 3.7.

Areas in need of better public transport links. The areas that stood out were Central Vuosaari, Herttoniemi, Pasila, city center, Meilahti, Malmi and Helsinki Airport.

Areas for improvement

We asked the respondents to choose two areas of public transport that need the most improvement. The most important areas for improvement identified were the number of services or service frequency, routes and ease of interchange between modes of transport.

We also asked the respondents for their views regarding public transport links serving East Helsinki and where public transport connectivity should be improved. The key areas raised in the responses include central Vuosaari, Herttoniemi, Pasila, Helsinki city center, the Meilahti Hospital area, central Malmi and Helsinki Airport.

Responses in the respondents' own words

We used three open-ended questions to gather information about problems with the current routes, what should be retained and what should be improved.

Here are some examples of the good things mentioned by the respondents:

• The metro service and high service frequency

• Comprehensive routes and transport links as well as stop locations close to key destinations and respondents’ homes

• Many respondents hoped that the routes of buses 92, 95 and 97V would remain unchanged

• Punctuality of bus services

The following problems were mentioned:

• Low frequency of service of feeder routes in the early morning and evening and on weekends

• Transport links within the area. Most bus routes terminate in Itäkeskus and many journeys within the area require interchanging in Itäkeskus. Especially transport links between Kurkimäki and Kontula, Kurkimäki and Myllupuro as well as between Myllypuro, Puotila and Vartioharju need improvement.

• Cross-town transport services especially from Ring Road I to the west in the evening and on weekends

• Circuitous routes of night buses

What next?

We will use the responses as baseline information for planning. We will ask our customers again for their views when drawing up detailed plans.

We will be reviewing bus routes in Itäkeskus, Mellunmäki and Puotila in autumn 2022.

On the basis of the survey, there is no need for a plan covering all feeder bus services in the area but we will review bus routes serving Kurkimäki, Kivikko and Myllypuro as well as night bus routes.

There is no more money available for the development of bus routes in Itäkeskus, Mellunmäki and Puotila than currently due to, among other things, the coronavirus epidemic. We need to plan the changes within our current budget.

We aim to implement possible changes at the latest in autumn 2023.

Background information on respondents

Places of residence

Most of the respondents who marked their place of residence on the map provided live in the primary target area, i.e. in the districts of Mellunkylä or Vartioharju.

In terms of numbers, we received the most responses from people living in Mellunmäki, Kontula and Myllypuro. In proportion to the population, residents of Vartioharju and Mellunmäki were the most active respondents. Among residents of the primary target area, the response rate was about four percent.

The image shows the respondent’s domiciles in a heatmap image.

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Age groups

Respondents spanned a diverse range of age groups. Respondents aged 50 to 64 were the largest age group, while respondents aged under 20 and 20 to 29 were the smallest age groups.

When we compared the proportion of respondents in different age groups between respondents living in the area and all people living in the area, the group of people aged 50–64 was the most clearly overrepresented group and the group of people 64 and over was underrepresented.

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Directions of current journeys

The respondents’ places of work and study were mostly located in East Helsinki’s district centers, in downtown Helsinki, the eastern central city area, Kalasatama, Vallila and Pasila as well as in the Meilahti Hospital area.

In eastern Helsinki, many places of work and study were in central Vuosaari, Itäkeskus, Myllypuro, Herttoniemi, Viikki and Malmi. Many places of work and study were also in Pitäjänmäki and Otaniemi.

Heatmap of respondents’ places of work and study

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Survey available in six languages

For the first time, the survey was available in six languages. In addition to Finnish, Swedish and English, respondents could complete the survey in Russian, Somali and Arabic.

We wanted to reach as many residents as possible. We translated the survey into several languages so that also people with an inadequate command of Finnish could complete the survey.

The proportion of respondents who completed the survey in some other language than Finnish did not correspond to the proportion of foreign-speaking residents in the area. About 90 percent of respondents completed the survey in Finnish. However, translating the survey into several languages was not in vain as the experiment compelled us to discuss how to reach those of our customers with an inadequate command of Finnish in the future.