Client: Baltic Environmental Forum Estonia, via the Interreg SUMBA+ programme
Location: Harju County, Estonia
Year: 2021
Sector: Crowdsourcing · Public Transit · UX Research
“Praise the Stop / Slam the Stop” — testing whether a simple QR code at a bus stop can out-perform social media for collecting real, representative feedback on transit stop quality.
Continuous, low-cost monitoring of public transit stop quality is hard — surveys are expensive and one-off, and social media feedback skews toward whoever’s already paying attention. This project tested a direct alternative: put a QR code on the stop itself.
Builds on SPIN Unit’s earlier “PeatusKOHT” (2020) study, which had defined a stop-typology framework but only recommended, without testing, QR-code-based feedback collection. This project put that recommendation into practice across Tallinn, Harku, and Lääne-Harju.
Installed QR-code posters at 100 pre-selected stops (50 Tallinn, 25 Harku, 25 Lääne-Harju), chosen along a key regional transit corridor and to cover the full PeatusKOHT stop-typology range, and ran the same questionnaire in parallel via a generic social-media/web link open to feedback on any stop. 1,097 responses were collected between August and October 2021.
Delivered as a 141-page bilingual report comparing the two collection channels, plus raw response datasets and a mocked-up monitoring dashboard concept for individual stops.
- QR-code-at-stop clearly outperformed social media for representative, stop-specific data — the social-media channel reached only about 23% of a given stop’s actual userbase and skewed toward Estonian-speaking women, useful only for the very highest-traffic stops.
- QR distribution was specifically the most effective channel for reaching younger users and Russian-speaking respondents — two groups traditional surveys typically struggle to reach.
- Lighting is the single biggest safety complaint everywhere in the region, with roughly half of respondents overall feeling stops are unsafe for children to use unsupervised.
- Bicycle and scooter parking/charging was the single most requested addition across all three municipalities, ahead of better shelter or real-time information.
- Proposed a concrete next step: permanent, individually generated QR codes (not paper stickers) feeding a live monitoring dashboard the transit authority could use on an ongoing basis — an explicit product concept, not just a one-off survey report.
Gave the region a tested, validated method for continuous, low-cost transit-stop monitoring — with a clear recommendation (QR over social media) backed by real comparative data, plus a concrete dashboard concept ready to build on.