Measuring behavioural responses to road transport informatics.

This paper combines the work of two DRIVE consortia V 1025- EURONETT and V 1011- CARGOES. Both projects are conducting survey work in several European cities into behavioural responses to RTI technologies. The first part of the paper was written by Laurie Pickup and Anthony Stathopoulos. It is based on work conducted in the EURONETT project. It discusses the extent to which RTI (Road Transport Informatics) requires a rethinking of conventional theories of travel behaviour and transport modelling. It reports on the results of qualitative surveys conducted in Athens and Birmingham to assess user responses to RTI scenarios. Road pricing options with parking management; enhanced driver information systems; enhanced public transport passenger information and enhanced traffic control systems. The results stress that clear market niches and types of behavioural response can be identified for RTI adoption. Familiarity with the environment is a very important feature in adopting and adhering to RTI. However, respondents had very low tolerance of perceived poor information in trip decision making. This random element could hamper the progress to measure and model behaviour in an RTI context. Part two of the paper was written by Peter Bonsall. It originates from DRIVE project V 1011 (the Integration of Route Guidance and Traffic Control Systems). It presents detailed results of three investigations into drivers' needs for, and reactions to, route guidance; firstly questionnaire surveys conducted in four European cities, secondly surveys amongst users of the LISB route guidance system in Berlin and thirdly work with the interactive simulation programme known as IGOR. It is shown that requirements vary markedly according to the drivers' familiarity with the network. Acceptance of advice is seen to be very dependent on its objective quality, on the quality of any previous advice, on the driver's familiarity with the network, and on the existence of any corroborating or conflicting evidence. The implications of these, and other, findings for system design, network efficiency, modelling and further research are explored.