Seasus has developed MIDAS, a multi-channel travel data platform that replaces traditional paper-based household travel surveys with smartphone-based data collection, giving transport organisations a faster, larger and more accurate picture of how people actually move.
Household travel surveys are the standard tool transport authorities use to understand regional travel patterns, but the conventional approach, a paper questionnaire covering a sample of residents over a handful of days, is slow, expensive and limited in what it can capture. It relies on a small sample over a short, specific window, and misses detail that matters for serious transport modelling.
MIDAS replaces that process with a smartphone app that collects travel data directly and automatically from participants over much longer periods, cutting the manual effort and cost of running a survey while expanding both the sample size and the richness of what's recorded, down to how a respondent rated the quality of a given trip. The platform can also pull in additional real-time and historical data feeds, such as traffic management systems, cameras and telecommunications data, layering a wider view on top of what the survey itself collects.
All of that incoming data is aggregated and processed automatically, with software-assisted tools to help transport planners interpret it, and the platform is designed to extend to predictive modelling, using AI to forecast network usage while accounting for factors like weather and events.
By replacing a slow, sample-limited paper process with continuous, automated data collection, MIDAS gives transport organisations the kind of detailed, real-time picture of travel behaviour needed to plan and manage their networks more effectively.
