Data from a Public Participation GIS survey on the everyday active travel experiences of residents from five European cities

This article describes two coupled datasets collected via an online Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) survey into respondent’s everyday active travel patterns, their perceptions and experiences of their travel environments, and how these change across different seasons (specifically summer and winter). The survey was distributed through Maptionnaire across five European cities: Helsinki Metropolitan Area (1114 respondents), Greater Copenhagen (1225 respondents), Greater London (1188 respondents), Greater Munich (855 respondents) and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (582 respondents) between November 2023 and February 2024. The first dataset comprises 4,964 anonymised survey responses in CSV format, organised by city, that detail travel patterns, multi-sensory perceptions, and socio-demographic information across summer and winter. The second dataset is spatial, provided in shapefile format, and includes 8,048 mapped points of pleasant and unpleasant travel places along everyday travel routes and 1,241 points of places along those routes where respondents desire additional street greenery across the five study cities. Mapped variables include sensory aspects like aesthetics and soundscape, along with specific street greenery elements such as street trees and plant beds. Together, these datasets enable inter-city and seasonal comparisons that may be of value to researchers and urban planners working to understand the relationships between urban street environments and active travel behaviour of urban residents in different European cities.