Tag Archives: MAAS

Smarter Future Choices

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Did Smarter Choices programmes make us smarter? Did personalised travel planning change personal travel behaviour? Did pilots, challenges, and temporary designations leave a lasting impression? These were the sort of questions my fellow transport professional @jamesgleave1 was asking in his blog of mid-March. His answer was, over time, a qualified not quite, a methodologically minimal.

One of the reasons he gave for his scepticism included the impossibility of disentangling any results from other changes to the accessibility offer. One of the reasons for moderating his response was the valuable discovery of links between travel behaviour choices and changes in other aspects of life, even if the presence of such links further diminished the attribution of impacts to Smarter Choices programmes themselves. Yet this got me thinking that if the debate around Smarter Choices is due to an inability to isolate its impacts, especially longer term, maybe we should start embracing its interactions. Surely Smarter Choices can build on existing trends, encourage any seeds of sustainability to grow without trying to plant them in the first place.

More people are living in cities with access to frequent public transport. Younger generational cohorts are delaying licence holding and car ownership, and are making fewer trips per capita. Surely these are trends on which we could build a Smarter Choices extension, focusing our information and incentives on younger, more urban audiences. Indeed, if younger people are spending their precious disposable income on devices instead of driving, all the more reason to put all that information and those incentives into mobile apps that integrate accessibility planning (including remote and virtual options!), real time information and alerts, fitness tracking, gamification… and perhaps booking and payment as well. The latter brings us to Mobility as a Service, which could be the next Smarter Choices, and indeed, most of the list in the last sentence is already available in one form or another, but is it integrated? Is it being developed to achieve Smarter Future Choices?

Another trend is that more and more jobs and occupations are becoming temporally and spatially independent from traditional workplaces, and the links between commuting distances or cost and residential location choice is weakening. So from travel planning to journey planning, we need to incorporate the geography of ICT supply and demand, and build on the ever-increasing flexibility of the modern economy and the potential for improving resilience that comes from such flexibility. In other words, there are ever more people working from home 1-2 days per week, so transport planners should nourish the trend. Surely Smarter Future Choices are being made if the proportion of car commuters who work from home once a week increases by 20%. Such a target would be easier to achieve than a 20% switch of car commuters to a sustainable mode of travel to work. In fact, previous rounds of Smarter Choices programmes may well have had such an impact, but this trend is poorly monitored by long-term surveys. Tracking this flexibility will be key to judging the success of such Smarter Future Choices.

Finally, Smarter Future Choices could offer daily flexibility via the technology at which younger generations are so adept, and increase awareness of the options urban places can offer. If done properly, this approach could result in so much more than a one-off intervention. It could result in the ability of travellers to decide daily what will not only be their most sustainable option, but also their most convenient, resilient, and productive option, no matter the day of the week, time of the day, weather or season – the smartest option is theirs to take.

 

Flexible Resolve

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Last month I wrote about the importance of evidence. The month before I wrote about how averages can’t always be used as evidence of what society needs from transport planners. And this month I have even more evidence of how little society may reflect averages.

The University Transport Studies Group annual conference was packed full of papers presenting ongoing or recently completed research from senior academics down to PhD students. The standard was high, and much of the work fascinating. A presentation offering an historic overview of urban transport policy by Professor Peter Jones of University College London best elucidated one conclusion I’ve been coming to over the last year – that we need to move from a ‘Predict and Provide’ to a ‘Vision and Validate’ model. To do this, transport planners must work with other sectors to change how their needs for accessibility can be met in order to meet mobility demand sustainably – and flexibly.

Flexibility is key. People’s need for mobility is dependent upon their need to access activities, goods, and services. As I’ve noted before, more and more people already maintain their accessibility in different ways at different times for different purposes. Their patterns of access can be variable instead of habitual. And between different people or groups of people, there is even more heterogeneity.

For example, there was a presentation on the night-time economy at the conference. I can’t say I’d given much thought to these sorts of workers before. Neither, it turns out, have policy-makers, who have focused on access to places of food, drink, and entertainment for the customers, ignoring those who work in these venues, who might require different travel options than those they serve. Never mind other 24-hour services, such as health and social care, or transport and logistics. How can we envision and plan for transport networks that work for these people, as well as the day-time commuter?

Various presentations also investigated whether ‘Mobility as a Service’ was a realistic scenario for the future of transport. There remain many barriers to its implementation and success. Not least if such services cannot match the flexibility of those most likely to sign on. One paper estimated that Mobility as a Service is of most interest to those who have private vehicles, but only drive their cars 1-2 days a week. Yet as noted in previous blogs, do our current methods of surveying and modelling sufficiently capture such regular, but infrequent behaviours that they enable the design of services catering to these people?

Another paper found that by looking at different data sources and then interrogating the results of one source with the results of the other, travel behaviours that seemed regular and even habitual masked variation. Those who travelled along a stretch of road regularly were more likely to vary their time of travel, whilst those who travelled less regularly were less likely to vary their timing. Getting the right messages out to these irregular travellers, who might not be familiar with their location or choices, is challenging. Yet, it is these people who most need advice, if, as another paper pointed out, they feel they can understand and trust that advice.

Trust is also key for all the ‘shared transport’ that we are apparently ever more willing to use in the 21st century, and, without which, many of our visions for a technologically-advanced, but sustainable future fall apart. However, to note the topic of one final presentation, we would do well to remember that not just vehicles, but roads too are a shared resource. And we don’t always trust each other to use even those flexibly and appropriately!

In conclusion, let’s hope for a New Year that brings not only transport research and policy development that supports flexibility and variation rather than habits and averages, but also a resolve to be a bit more flexible ourselves.

 

You Say You Want a Revolution

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Some say there’s a revolution in transport. But to have a revolution, you need revolutionaries.

Transport is certainly undergoing a transformation in the digital age, forging ahead rapidly in the buzzwords of ‘big data’ generation and the development of ‘Internet of Things’ connections. Transport has become ‘smarter’, i.e. more automated, more dynamic, more shared, and more personalised, such that ‘mobility as a service’ (MAAS) is billed as the ‘mode’ of travel of the future. But is MAAS the transport revolution of the 21st century in the same way that the train or the automobile revolutionised transport in the 19th and 20th centuries by creating mass markets of revolutionaries willing to adopt new ways of getting around and even new lifestyles because of the new transport technology?

According to Professor Cristina Pronello of the Université Technologique de Compiègne and Politecnico di Torino, MAAS will only revolutionize transport and travel behaviour if it is developed in a ‘user-centric’, transparent and integrated manner. Which, she said, means MAAS should not be developed and imposed on society by the big corporate players such as Google, Amazon, Apple, etc.

In a talk she recently gave at the University of Greenwich, she compared the tech company travel solutions to an app which was developed for Turin, Italy as part of a European Commission-funded project she led. She called her app an urban navigator, not a journey planner, and pointed to the depth of real-time, multi-modal feeds and customization it offered to users to support their travel decisions.

This ticked the user-centric and integrated boxes, but the Professor admitted difficulty both in establishing data-sharing arrangements with the various transport providers to build truly real-time integration and also in recruiting participating travellers to ensure user-centricity.

I couldn’t help thinking that Google Maps has none of these problems. Most people have it pre-loaded on their smartphone, and the company set the original standard for open data feeds. And if it has not quite the depth and real-time reactions of the app she discussed, I have met Google employees and am given to understand that they are constantly improving the multi-modal integration and accuracy of their mapping – journey planning – navigation tools through validated historic trips which users have themselves tracked and reported.

So what about transparency? There’s the rub. The European project embarked on numerous contracts, enforced a standard data format, and created an open data portal. Anyone with the skills could see where the data was coming from and how it was driving the app’s results. The tech giants are much more opaque, and most would agree that they are more motivated by the bottom line and intellectual property rights, than by a public service mission.

Yet, as was discussed in another presentation in Greenwich, traditional methods and local governments can fail to address social equity in their transport provision as much as corporations do. Although statistical methods tend to be based on assumptions about behaviour in the pursuit of explaining why travel patterns occur and how societal trends may influence those patterns, they are rarely then used to influence decisions to create more equitable patterns. And the models themselves are often black boxes, with calculations undertaken within proprietary software.

In contrast, the algorithms of data analytics are based on no assumptions at all. They seek to learn patterns to accurately make predictions, not to explain how or why those futures have come to pass. If such patterns are most likely to create a viable, successful Mobility as a Service, then transport practitioners should surely be turning to algorithms instead of assumptions, and perhaps also to companies like Google for their expertise – and for access to all those potential revolutionaries already using Google Maps or paying for multi-modal transport on their smartphones.

And yet. Maybe the companies of the digital age should only be supporting the revolution, not leading it. If they are producing the algorithms and finding the patterns, there is still a place for transport planners, land use planners, and civic society to shape those patterns to be more equitable, more affordable, more sustainable. The beauty of those algorithms is that if they happen to find a pattern in the shape of a virtuous circle, they’ll advertise it and disseminate it without asking why, and that really would be a revolution.