Browsing by Author "Balbontín Tahnuz, Camila"

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    Mobility as a Service users: insights from a trial in Sydney
    (2023) Smith, Göran; Hensher, David A.; Ho, Chinh; Balbontín Tahnuz, Camila
    The positive effects that Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is envisioned to have on transport can only be reaped if people are using MaaS. Yet, the understanding of the user perspective on MaaS is incomplete and primarily based on experiments with non-users. To address this shortcoming, this paper reports user experiences from a trial of a high-level MaaS service in Sydney, Australia. Based on questionnaires and interviews, it analyses who participated in the trial and why, and whether the trial experience satisfied their motives. The contribution to the literature on MaaS is three-fold. Firstly, most of the people that participated in the trial were frequent users of both public transport and private cars. This supports the notion that multi-modal travellers are likely early adopters of MaaS and contradicts the fear that MaaS does not appeal to private car users. Secondly, a desire to contribute to innovation and curiosity about MaaS were the main motives for signing up for the trial, which highlights the important role an inviting setting for experimentation, such as a trial, can play in stimulating MaaS adoption. Thirdly, many participants struggled with making the trialled service work for them and on average they seemed to value the support and feedback functions higher than other service features. This underscores the novelty of MaaS, compared to existing service models, and reiterates the notion that more than an app and a few subscription plans is needed to make MaaS useful for users.
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    Profiling future passenger transport initiatives to identify the growing role of active and micro-mobility modes
    (2024) Hensher, David A.; Wei, Edward; Liu, Wen; Balbontín Tahnuz, Camila
    There is growing interest in recognising the role that active and micro-mobility modes play in the full suite of modal-based activities. While the idea of the 'next normal' since the heady days of COVID-19 remains unclear, there are signs that living locally and the impact of increased working from home, has generated greater interest in active travel and micro-mobility for local trips, but also as ways to access and/or egress modes for longer trips. A new travel and mobility survey has been designed in which revealed and stated preference data are collected to identify current and future interest in using motorised and non-motorised modes in a typical week. It considers mode use for all stages of a door-to-door journey in an extensive number of trip profiles. Trip frequency over a 7-day week is much more informative than the more traditional choice of a mode survey approach for a typical day. We estimate a series of negative binomial models on the stated preference (SP) scenario data to gain an understanding of the role that active and micro-mobility modes play as access, egress, and linehaul modes in an origin-destination trip. The descriptive profiles and estimated models provide a way to identify and hence focus the treatment of active and micro-mobility modes in government policy settings designed to support the move to more sustainable modes for all local passenger trips. The modes showing the most potential from the SP inquiry include EV car driver, car passenger, walk and E-bike/E-Scooter, if external conditions allow (i.e., similar to SP scenarios when external restrictions are removed). This growing interest in non-public transport opportunities looks like adding challenges to growing public transport patronage.