Understanding transit user’s intention to voluntarily share transit information through social media

Digitalisierung und neue Technologien
Öffentlicher Verkehr

Forschungseinrichtungen

Österreich
Tirol

2016

Eingereicht beim VCÖ-Mobilitätspreis

Ziele/Ideen

Advanced public transport systems for trip information play an important role in easing the users’ travel planning process.The traditional practice of Public Transport (PT) information provision considers operators as active communicators of information, while PT users are considered as passive, only receiving information. As operators generally provide pre-planned information, this does not account for momentary user experiences.Thus, user's need remain unclear to the operator in real-time. Extending users accessibility to interact with other actors to acquire information by following the trend of advanced information technology and with the use of social media, PT information systems can be improved. User empowerment and building collective knowledge can highly contribute to dynamic planning processes that can allow users to maximize their utility from the real time information as well as detect the cavities in the system.

Kurzbeschreibung

This study aims at revealing the motivators for sharing information by users for the concept of user-operator shared responsibility in the success of PT systems.It is based on a conceptual system, which will enable users to receive real-time user-customized information from operators, and gain from travel experience of other users. In this platform, users will be able to ask and receive information from the system as well as share the needs (e.g.delays, available seats etc.). Notably, there are available applications with similar principles for transit users (e.g., Moovit). This research is jointly conducted at the University of Innsbruck and Technical University Denmark(DTU). It is part of the IPTOP(integrated public transport planning and optimization) project from DTU to develop new innovations for optimizing public transport network. It is also part of the Short Term Scientific Mission in COST (European Cooperation in Science Technology) Action.

Resultate

Considering the two countries, the required sample size is roughly 500 completed questionnaires for each country. The survey is ongoing and until now 850 responses have been collected. The deadline for submitting the survey will end on 5th July,2016. Afterwards, the hypothesized behavioural framework will be investigated by formulating a structural equation model (SEM) because of the need to model simultaneously endogenous latent constructs, their relationship with exogenous observed variables, and their correlation pattern.