Travel Experience in Public Transport: A Geospatial Analysis by Experience Mapping

Abstract

A change towards sustainability is crucial also in the transportation sector. However, humans’ need for mobility is increasing. Therefore, a shift towards sustainable transportation is necessary. Besides changes in reliability and availability, transportation can be made more attractive by better understanding travelers’ needs. This paper presents first results of a study with 23 participants that traveled by public transport. We continuously recorded travel satisfaction, stress, event, and cardiological data. We plotted the collected data averaged in 0.0008 degree squares over the traveled map to detect points of collective positive or negative travel experience in public transport. Preliminary results show that bothersome people are a major cause for negative experience at a busy changing point. This adds to existing research, as most previous studies have concentrated on time- and cost aspects of public transport. Our method is a powerful tool to analyze points at which a transportation system needs to change to take the traveler’s needs into account.