Bringing citizens closer to mobility decisions
How do city authorities know whether a new bike lane, a traffic restriction or a mobility policy is meeting citizens' needs? While public consultations remain important, residents increasingly express their opinions online, sharing experiences, concerns and suggestions through social media and digital platforms.
A digital bridge between cities and citizens
Within the GOLIA project, GO-INFO has been developed to help cities capture and understand these voices. As part of the wider GO-X digital infrastructure, GO-INFO serves as the main interface between policymakers and citizens, creating a structured channel through which cities can gather feedback, monitor public reactions and improve mobility policies based on residents' perspectives.
GO-INFO is designed to support a more participatory approach to urban mobility governance. Rather than relying exclusively on top-down decision-making, the platform enables continuous dialogue between local authorities and the communities they serve.
It allows cities to collect feedback on existing mobility projects, test new ideas and better understand how different sustainable measures are perceived by residents. At the same time, citizens can use the platform to share suggestions, raise concerns and contribute ideas that may not yet be part of official policy discussions.
Combining surveys with social sentiment analysis
To support this dialogue, GO-INFO brings together several tools that capture different types of citizen feedback.
One of these is a survey tool, which allows cities to create tailored questionnaires on specific mobility topics. Authorities can define their own questions and target particular population groups, generating data that can support policy development and evaluation.
Alongside surveys, GO-INFO includes a social sentiment analysis tool. City authorities can launch a discussion around a specific mobility issue and monitor the reactions generated on social media platforms. The system analyses comments and conversations to identify recurring themes, concerns, suggestions and levels of support for different policy options.
The platform currently supports discussions on Reddit and Facebook, allowing cities to capture perspectives from different online communities. While discussions on social media can often include off-topic or disruptive comments, the tool helps filter this noise and fake profiles to focus on the most relevant contributions.
Understanding feelings, not counting votes
Unlike traditional polling methods, GO-INFO is not intended to produce statistically representative results.
Instead, its purpose is to help policymakers understand the sentiment surrounding a policy or proposal. The platform focuses on identifying qualitative feedback, emerging concerns and practical suggestions rather than determining exactly how many people support a particular measure.
This approach can be particularly valuable when exploring complex mobility challenges, where understanding why people support or oppose a measure can be more important than simply measuring approval rates. By revealing the arguments, concerns and expectations expressed by residents, GO-INFO can help cities develop more informed and adaptive responses.
Making policymaking more transparent
Beyond gathering feedback, GO-INFO also aims to improve transparency.
The platform includes a public dashboard where residents can follow the progress of mobility initiatives and policy developments. By presenting information in a clear and accessible format, the dashboard helps citizens track how projects evolve over time and how public input contributes to decision-making.
This creates a feedback loop in which residents are not only consulted but can also see how policies are progressing and how their perspectives are taken into account.
