Smartphone mobility assistants. A lever to guide route choice preferences in mass transit?

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2024

Subject Area

place - europe, place - urban, mode - mass transit, planning - travel demand management, planning - signage/information, operations - capacity, ridership - behaviour

Keywords

Public transport demand management, Passenger congestion, Transit maps, Comfort, Route planning

Abstract

The regulation of passenger congestion in mass transit is a persistent issue that requires ingenious and cost-effective solutions to ensure that related operations run at optimum capacity. Mass transit operators may implement Public Transport Demand Management (PTDM) strategies like cognitive levers to tackle this issue by targeting passengers’ behaviour during the route planning that precedes travel in mass transit. In this regard, multiple experimental studies in cognitive psychology and sciences have shown that transit maps can be used to guide passengers’ route choice preferences in mass transit.

A route choice experiment was conducted to examine the potential of smartphone mobility assistants as a tool to guide mass transit users’ away from the fastest options that tend to be predominantly preferred. 582 participants took part in an online study where they engaged in a route selection task by indicating their route choices in the Île-de-France mass transit system. We measured how participants’ preferences for the fastest route varied depending on the visual format in which routes were presented (on a transit map, on a timeline or listed briefly as per current trends), the presence of conflicting visuo-spatial information on the transit map (fastest choice = shortest vs. longest choice) and the level of comfort (availability of simple transfers and/or less congested routes).

The main results suggest the existence of two levers than can be implemented in smartphone mobility assistants to manage passenger congestion in mass transit: (1) a perceptive heuristic whereby passengers presented with a transit map manifest a preference for the route presented as the shortest on the map and (2) the possibility to sway a proportion of passengers away from the choice of the fastest route by presenting information about the comfort levels of alternative options.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part A Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09658564

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