Discover the results of the mobility survey carried out at ULiège in 2024

The mobility survey carried out at the University of Liège from March 18 to April 22, 2024 collected more than 4,000 questionnaires and more than 700 comments, making it possible to update data on how people travel to the Arlon, Gembloux and Liège campuses. This information will also be used to draw up ULiège's mobility policy for the 2025/2030 period.

Results by campus and by public

While the data requested by the SPF mobilité focuses on home/work travel, the University of Liège wanted to obtain a finer, broader vision. For this reason, a series of additional questions have been added to the questionnaire provided by the federal government, and from 2021 onwards, the survey has been extended to include students.

Find out more about the results, by campus and by audience.

Key figures

For staff members:

The participation rate among staff members reached 40%, an increase of +10% compared to the survey conducted in 2021.

The main findings of this survey are

• The decline in self-driving continues (-13% since 2017) to reach 60% of trips. In Wallonia as a whole, this practice represented 81.4% of home/work trips in urban areas in 2021.
• Walking is on the rise, with a modal share of 5%, an increase of +3% since 2017.
• The number of train journeys has risen to 9%, while bus journeys are back to pre-COVID levels (12%).
• Cycling accounted for 11% of trips made. While the increase in cycling was mainly observed between 2017 and 2021 (+7%), the number of kilometers traveled continues to climb (from 133,000 km in 2017 to 477,000 km in 2023), thanks to a practice that also extends into the winter period.

Students:

The participation rate for this edition is 8%, down 3% on the previous survey.

The main findings of this survey are as follows

• Mobility habits have changed little since 2021,
• The majority of journeys are made by public transport, and the share of bus journeys continues to grow, reaching 44% of journeys to campus,
• Inter-site/campus daytime travel concerns 48% of students, compared with 45% in 2021,
• 80% of survey participants (regular bus users or not) said they had subscribed to the €12/year pass introduced by the TEC for 18/24 year-olds,
• Micromobility (self-service scooters or personal vehicles) remains a marginal practice (0.15%) for getting to ULiège campuses.

A daily mobility policy that must take account of different realities

At its meeting on February 19, 2020, the Board of Directors of the University of Liège approved a 5-year institutional mobility policy. This defined the strategy to be followed, the objectives to be achieved and the action plan to be implemented to encourage, on the one hand, a reduction in institution-related travel, and on the other hand, a modal shift towards alternatives to the private car.

The survey conducted this spring 2024 at ULiège is carried out every 3 years, as required by the SPF mobilité for companies with more than 100 employees. This regularity makes it possible to evaluate actions taken to date, provide data for calculating the university's carbon footprint, and feed into the work of updating the mobility policy.

The participation of each and every one of us in this tri-annual survey is useful in guiding our institution's future choices in terms of day-to-day mobility.

Logically, the results of the mobility surveys carried out in recent years differ greatly depending on the audience (students/staff) and the location of the campuses (inner city/outer suburbs).

For these reasons, the mobility policy currently being updated will propose separate objectives for students and staff for the 2025/2030 period, to ensure that the projects and actions envisaged are more in line with the reality of each individual.

As an educational institution, the University generates a great deal of travel every day, which it wishes to address in order to improve the accessibility of its campuses, while at the same time contributing to social and environmental transition.