The International Association of Public Transport (UITP, from the French: L’Union internationale des transports publics) is a non-profit advocacy organization for public transport authorities and operators, policy decision-makers, scientific institutes and the public transport supply and service industry. The association was founded on August 17, 1885 by King Leopold II in Brussels, Belgium to support the Belgian tram and steel industries. UITP supports a holistic approach to urban mobility and advocates for public transport development and sustainable mobility..
Shared travel offers an important way to increase the accessibility of rail services. However, providing an integrated shared travel capability for rail travel is both a conceptual and technical challenge. This paper presents an overview of Ride2Rail, enabling ‘Easy use for all’ of rail through ridesharing as part of a multimodal journey. Ride2Rail has the overall objective of developing intelligent multimodal mobility, by facilitating the efficient combination of flexible and crowdsourced transport services, such as ridesharing, with scheduled transport. A requirements activity has set out the travel behaviour and system requirements for Ride2Rail. Development activities have covered the technical implementation of Ride2Rail, involving both development of the Ride2Rail functionalities and the Ride2Rail Driver Companion application, integrated within the wider Shift2Rail ecosystem. Demonstration activities have involved the preparation, implementation, execution and monitoring of Ride2Rail at four demonstration sites. This paper outlines the overall approach and findings of the Ride2Rail. This demonstrates the technical feasibility of integrating shared travel, including the architecture for a shared ride capability that can be readily integrated into pre-existing Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platform. Additionally, the paper reports positive user attitudes to this kind of shared travel, within the context of multimodal trips.
A variety of evaluation methods for user interfaces (UI) exist such as usability testing, cognitive walkthrough, and heuristic evaluation. However, UIs such as guidance systems at transit hubs must be evaluated in their intended application field to allow the effective and valid identification of usability flaws. However, what if evaluations are not feasible in real environments, or laboratorial conditions cannot be ensured? Based on adapted heuristics, in the present study, the method of heuristic evaluation is combined with immersive Virtual Reality (VR) for the identification of usability flaws of dynamic guidance systems (DGS) at transit hubs. The study involved usability evaluations of nine DGS concepts using the newly proposed method. The results show that compared to computer-based heuristic evaluations, the use of immersive VR led to the identification of an increased amount of “severe” usability flaws as well as overall usability flaws. Within a qualitative assessment, immersive VR is validated as a suitable tool for conducting heuristic evaluations involving significant advantages such as the creation of realistic experiences in laboratorial conditions. Future work seeks to further prove the suitability of using immersive VR for heuristic evaluations and compare the proposed method to other evaluative methods.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has had considerable impacts on research projects, particularly those adopting participatory approaches. This paper reflects on the methodological adaptations employed by the European research project TRIPS to facilitate co-design and open innovation practices towards the development of accessible mobility solutions. The article reports how the methods were adapted to facilitate participatory research with almost no physical meetings. In doing so, the paper presents the alternative ‘distanced-based’ participatory approaches employed to engage users with disabilities and institutional stakeholders in the transport ecosystem, like online workshops, social media content analysis, online surveys and peer-to-peer telephone interviews. Lessons learnt and practical guidelines for distance-based participatory research are presented and discussed with the aim of increasing resilience in the light of future changes.
