To better understand how practitioners are using formal tools and where they need to be improved, a targeted survey was conducted online with 16 professionals working in transport from a variety of regions within the European Union.

The four step model is the one most widely used. The professionals surveyed were satisfied overall with four step models as forecasts are sufficiently reliable, taking into account the data that are available. That said, these models do not have the ability to fully understand chain trips. To clarify, chain trips are trips that, on the surface, may seem to be a simple home-work or work-home commute, but which actually include multiple stops, such as the kids’ school, the gym, the supermarket, and so forth. The reason why these extra stops are important is because they reduce people’s flexibility, which in turn affects how they will respond to incentives. Four step models that reduce the complexity of daily trips will therefore tend to overestimate the impact of certain measures, such as road charging, on people’s behaviour.

Practitioners are aware of the potential of activity based models, which are capable of modelling the emergence of new social trends and technologies and new types of transport policies. However, activity based models are not always practical as they require more resources for data collection and more computing power, and as a result are costlier.

A major issue is that there are still a lot of gaps in the data, particularly where the cities and regions in question do not control all aspects of mobility and therefore might not have access to information that is collected by transport operators. Surveys tend to focus on peak travel, leaving travel during non-peak times or by non-commuters and tourists (useful for estimating environmental impact) underrepresented. In addition, travel surveys often do not include parameters related to personal values and attitudes that may underlie the fundamental motives for modal choices. Another challenge involves how quickly technologies, and thus behaviour, are evolving. The impact of emerging technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, and “sharing” services is not yet fully understood. Major societal and technological shifts, along with changing lifestyles and values, still need to be studied in depth. Better data and a better grasp of mobility behaviour could go a long way towards improving the accuracy of these models.

Mobility lifestyles are becoming increasingly diverse, and simple variables are not enough to accurately forecast behaviour. This kind of forecasting is particularly important if policy makers wish to induce behavioural change. But new data sources and technologies, such as GPS information from mobile phones, public transport smart cards, data from sensors in the vehicles and technologies used to enforce traffic schemes, could fill some existing data gaps and provide information on behavioural responses to policy or infrastructural changes. The question of models and tools, and how these can be improved, will be looked at more closely in future MIND-SETS activities.

For more information, contact Laurent Franckx of VITO

By examining the value sets of different generations, we can come up with new insights about mobility, particularly with regard to technical and service innovation and the impact of social and psychological forces on Europeans’ decisions and lifestyles. While the specific characteristics of each generation are influenced by other socio-cultural, psychological, biological and economic factors, we can still create a rough sketch of the various “types”.

For digital aboriginals, or the generation born after 2000, the digital world is as permanent and real as the air they breathe. They are at ease immediately with any new form of technology and tend to be extremely image conscious, frequently sharing life events on social media such as Facebook and Instagram. With regard to mobility, the line between virtual and physical spaces is an often indistinct one.

Millennials, born between 1985 and 1999, are a contradictory bunch as, on the one hand, they are highly likely to use smartphones and be connected on social media, yet they also feel the need to get away from it at times and put a high value on face-to-face interaction. These peripatetic egalitarians are flexible, and prefer shared, collaborative solutions over competitive, owned ones. Above all, they value authenticity and conviviality, something which mobility product and service providers should take into consideration.

Prime busters, the generation born between 1965 and 1984, never have enough money, time or space. They grew up in a pre-internet, pre-smartphone world but have become digital and spend a lot of time on social networks, particularly LinkedIn. They struggle with finding balance in their lives and value local, sustainable, and ethical products and services. As a bridge between generations, they share traits with both the baby boomers (roughly those born between 1940 and 1970) and the millennials.

Baby bloomers, or back end baby boomers, born between 1955 and 1970, are comfortable with technology and social media, but also value their privacy. They are not interested in quick fads and the built-in obsolescence of many new products, and to engage with them, mobility product and service providers should offer high-quality, customized services with lasting value.

Master boomers, who were born between 1940 and 1955, have a lot of time and money to spend. They want to remain healthy, active and independent. To attract them, product and service providers will need to focus on applications and services that promote healthy, adventurous and active lifestyles.

While not exhaustive, these generational perspectives can offer mobility providers and policy makers important insights on how people of different age brackets are likely to respond to new policies, products and services. More about generational perspectives and differences, and how these can be applied to the market, will be showcased in the MIND-SETS guidelines and Knowledge Centre.

For more information, contact Stefaan Vandist of Pocket Marketing

It probably goes without saying that we can’t talk about the new mobility without talking about ICTs. As the locus of social groups has shifted from neighbourhoods and workplaces to ICT social networks, the division between work and leisure and between physical and virtual spaces are no longer clear. But the relationship between the virtual and physical worlds is complementary rather than zero-sum; virtual communication has not eliminated the need for face-to-face contact, but instead created a greater need for in-person meetings to reinforce relationships established virtually. Because of this, the rise in social networks and ICTs may lead to an increase in transportation needs and services.

The unmooring of activities from specific locations has made mobility patterns more flexible, less structured and less predictable, which of course makes understanding them that much more difficult. ICTs stimulate travel and increase efficiency, as for example with the shipping of goods and smart warehousing, and allow for both “top-down” (online trip planners) and “bottom-up” (user generated information) interaction with the transport system in real time.

Specifically, three direct and indirect impacts of social networks and ICTs on travel behaviour can be identified: 1) changes in travel behaviour as ICTs are used to maintain social networks; 2) the influence of ICTs on social interaction which in turn influence travel patterns; and 3) changes in travel patterns as the use of ICTs impacts the relationship between social interaction and physical mobility.

ICTs have transformed the spaces we live in and the mobility we use to shuttle within and between those spaces. The upcoming MIND-SETS approach and subsequent guidelines will offer a more detailed exploration of how.

For more information, contact Pnina Plaut of Technion

Our attitudes and decisions regarding mobility are very much influenced by our psychology, by our beliefs and by the values imbued by our social relationships and our communities. But it is a two-way street; our psychological state affects our mobility, but mobility also affects our psychology. Our well-being requires the fulfilment of three basic needs: autonomy, that is, the freedom to explore our environment, competence, or feeling in control, and relatedness, our sense of connection with others. Yet the satisfaction of these needs is difficult (if not impossible) if we cannot move where, when and how we want.

The autonomy, control, connection and consequent sense of connection that mobility offers can also be taken away when mobility is restricted. For groups such as the elderly, the lack of mobility can have a negative social and psychological impact. Where entire communities are mobility-deprived, the community’s collective self-esteem suffers and this sense of exclusion and inequality – this sense of injustice and frustration – can lead to social ills such as xenophobia and radicalized behaviour.

But even in less extreme situations, psychological and sociological considerations play an important role. Aside from the standard neo-classical considerations of costs and benefits, there are “hedonic” factors that are harder to measure, intangibles such as perceived ease of use and “fun”. There are also normative rewards, like when people feel they are “doing the right thing”. All of these are important to consider if we want to encourage people to adopt more sustainable forms of transportation. Users need to perceive the costs as low and the benefits as high, and where costs are not low enough or hedonic benefits not high enough, there needs to be a normative payoff. This is where cultural and social influences come into play: for example, in countries where cycling is a social norm, it is easier to get people to adopt more sustainable forms of mobility.

Culture not only determines whether or not we are socially encouraged to embrace sustainability, it also influences how we perceive the space around us, our urban environment and the architecture that surrounds us. Social and spatial relationships, and thus mobility, are all interconnected. People exist within physical, mental and virtual spaces, and the line between these spaces has been blurred by social media and ICTs. People text and listen to music while walking down the street, internet communities mimic tight-knit rural communities in building networks of trust that generate new modes of travel such as ride sharing. We project an image and seek social approval through mobility, with the new mobility, sharing services and connectivity becoming new arbiters of status.

So how do we design policies to avoid locking marginalized groups into mobility-deprived ghettoes? How do we provide incentives, customized by culture and country, to encourage sustainable mobility? How do we design new mobility products and services that cross the physical and virtual worlds?

That is what the MIND-SETS approach, as well as the subsequent guidelines and Knowledge Centre, will address.

For more information, contact Berfu Unal of the University of Groningen

According to neo-classical economics, people make rational decisions based on costs and benefits, and a monetary value can be ascribed to each aspect of the decision-making process. These social cost-benefit analyses and the models associated with them have long influenced projects and policy appraisal in transport. But are they really accurate in their assessments?

The problem is that people are not always perfectly rational and their decisions are not always based on straightforward cost-benefit trade-offs. For instance, people have been shown to react to seemingly irrelevant information, and to be sensitive to social pressures. Yet four-step models based on neo-classical thinking continue to be the models predominantly used to understand the decision-making process. There do exist other models that better reflect the complexity of people’s thinking, such as hybrid choice models and activity-based models. Hybrid choice models include non-rational elements in the decision-making process, such as habit, ignorance, beliefs, attitudes and social norms. Activity-based models are based on the activities for which trips are made and can therefore reflect, to give one example, the constraints of family life on the mobility decisions of individual household members. Yet, as explained in A survey of transport planners, four-step models remain the models of choice for transport decision-making.

Behavioural economics tries to give a more holistic picture by looking at how people are affected by contextual elements in their decision making and how peer pressure affects their behaviour. It is also remarkably difficult to change habits and so the best time to nudge people towards behavioural change is when they are already going through some kind of transition such as a job change, getting married or having children. That said, this reluctance to change could be mitigated somewhat by dependable, multi-modal travel information, which would give travellers an array of options that they otherwise might not be aware of. This and other changes to today’s mobility will require new theories and new models that are capable of analysing mobility decisions in all their complexity. The MIND-SETS approach, guidelines and Knowledge Centre, will offer insights that could potentially pave the way towards these new theories and models.

For more information, contact Laurent Franckx of VITO