What you see is where you get: Supporting travellers with live maps using geo-temporal selection

With vehicle numbers rising, shifts to public transport could reduce environmental effects and congestion while also improving traffic safety. To lower the threshold, barriers such as lack of real-time travel information should be removed. Geo-temporal selection (GTS) is a novel concept which integrates data of fine-grained individual vehicle movement for literally millions of transport units and enables predictive analytics in a single computational model.

Decision-making research shows that misperceptions in judgments of route choice and travel time in drivers can be alleviated by providing a decision tool. It has not yet been studied how a GTS-based interface can help avoid misperceptions in travellers’ multi-modal decision making, and to do this, the project aims to combine decision-making research with advances in GTS. The overall objectives are to: 1) increase the knowledge of travellers’ decision processes, more specifically with regard to the impact of GTS on travel behaviour, route choices, and increases in multi-modal travel and 2) to determine the key interface components that would yield the highest utility for travellers. Hypothesis: A GTS decision tool will improve the quality of real-time travel information, facilitate travel planning, making public transport more attractive, and allowing travellers to discover alternative routes by visual inspection. Travel pattern effects will be studied in users of a GTS-based tool.

Findings will contribute to the literature on decision processes in public transport and a prototype demonstrator will be developed and presented to the general public, researchers, and other stakeholders at conferences, in reports and scientific journals.