Mobility Matters Daily #76 - On demand transport, subjective accessibility, and transport infrastructure and activities
The latest news from the world of mobility
People in lower incomes prefer on demand transport over fixed route services
An age old debate in public transport is between whether you serve fixed lines frequently, but with little flexibility, or do you become demand responsive? New research from the USA indicates that in low income neighbourhoods, people would prefer on demand mobility. And the most significant barrier to take up is not access to technology, but confidence in using it. As well as significant safety concerns for women.
Stated preferences should be, rightly, treated with the skepticism it deserves. The ultimate success of both system types are defined by a variety of variables like population density and routing capability. There are concerns about on-demand mobility from an equity and ridership perspective. This is not to forget understanding what affects the economics of public transport. The solution? Simple. Understand what sort of system works in what context, and build that.
Journey time statistics in the UK are gone, but maybe that’s good?
In recent research for a client, I noticed that the UK Department for Transport has pulled all data on journey times to major services from its statistics post-2017. For understandable reasons. It’s a useful dataset, but perhaps we are thinking of accessibility in the wrong way in any case?
Interesting work in Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Malmo has indicated that compared to objective measures of accessibility, when you account for people’s perceptions accessibility inequalities are under-represented in official accessibility statistics. This reflects similar work in Nottingham, UK, that shows there is a significant difference between self-reporting accessibility and objective measures, and the latter can under-estimate journey time accessibility. Maybe we should consider adding the subjective to the objective.
How new transport infrastructure affects activities is relatively poorly understood
We know that new transport infrastructure affects trips. But how does it affect people’s activities? Interestingly, as professionals we understand this much less. Recently, some work in Dar es Salaam comparing informal transport being replaced by Bus Rapid Transit showed that BRT was perceived to benefit workers, whilst those using informal transport used it to undertake daily activities. But amazingly, apart from that research, there are no studies of the impacts of transport investment on personal activities.
We know that the presence of some infrastructure attracts different household types, including in places such as rural Kenya. And there are long disputes over the impacts on economic activity. But few studies on how household and individual activities change as a result of transport investment. A PhD thesis in the making, perhaps?