Personalized mobility to urban travelers

Although public multi-modal transit systems, coupled with integrated fare management and road user charging, are necessary to better manage mobility, they are not sufficient. Citizens must be offered personalized travel information, where and when such information is needed to take decisions that will make their journeys more efficient and enjoyable. Notably, such information is not purely qualitative (e.g., bus timetable, live bus tracking), but crucially subjective (e.g., crowdedness of trains, heat of tube platforms, sociability of the coaches). The perception and value attached to this information varies substantially, not only across people (e.g., different tolerance to delays, different perception of crowdedness, different taste in the social environment), but also for the same person in different contexts (e.g., work commute, leisure trip with the family). Thanks to mobile participatory sensing, fine-grain and up-to-date view of the city’s transportation system may be obtained to assist urban traveler in their journeys. The overall goal is to favor the use of public transportation and contribute to both social and environmental sustainability. Initial study on such mobility systems has been undertaken as part of the TravelDashboard[1] project and related research on supporting mobile participatory sensing system is being continued with the ARLES-MIMOVE team.