Usually the day starts with a lot of questions: How will the weather be? What should I wear? Who makes such a noise in the morning? Maybe you should ask the mayor about it. What is the town hall chief’s opinion on rain, clothing and the construction site? After all, the town hall chief seems to be constantly worried about what his citizens think. Surveys are no longer just something for the demoscopes of well-known opinion research institutes. Probably there have long been whole departments in town halls that do a kind of citizen research and think up questions all day long. Some of them raise questions.
The youth survey by the Unterhachingen SPD, which wanted to know from young people: On which days do you mainly use the recycling houses? And: How do you reach the collection points? On foot, by bike, by car? Students are used to having to answer questions that sometimes seem as strange to them as the teachers who ask them. Especially since the school does not accept that teenagers are only willing to answer questions with a maximum of yes or no in the morning.
There was also a recent survey on organic waste for everyone from Unterhaching, in which participants could win the annual contribution to the waste fees. The current opinion polls from the town hall, on the other hand, deal with another communal favorite topic: traffic. Specifically, it is about the future road layout on the stump meadow. The first question on the sheet handed out leaves the people between Whitney- and Ludwig-Specht-Strasse a little perplexed: Where did you go this morning?
The administrations in Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn and Pullach are also very interested in the mobility behavior of their citizens. No one would have suspected before that there would be a large number of commuters between the two communities. But now they submit a joint questionnaire: car sharing, cargo bikes, 30 km / h – they just want to know everything. Once the results are available, a clear statement can be made with certainty about how often the Pullachers take the underground to Siegertsbrunn.
There are still many questions that citizens have never answered. Surveys have long known that around 22 percent of Austrians go to the sauna because they like to sweat, and only nine percent because the stove crackles so nicely. But Austria may currently not be such a good example of credible opinion polls. On the other hand, great suggestions can be found in job interviews with large corporations. “Would you rather fight a duck the size of a horse or a hundred horses the size of ducks?” More importantly, “How do you get a giraffe in a refrigerator?” No citizen should say that he was not asked.