Impact of New Mobility Solutions on Travel Behaviour and Its Incorporation into Travel Demand Models

Abstract

Advancement in the fields of electrification, automation, and digitalisation and emerging social trends are fuelling the transformation of road transport resulting in the introduction of various innovative mobility solutions. Yet the reaction of people to many of the new solutions is still vastly unknown. This creates an unprecedented quandary for transport planners who are requested to design future transport systems and create the related investment plans without fully validated models to base the assessment upon. As some evidence on citizens’ behaviour concerning new mobility solutions starts to be progressively made available, first attempts to update the existing models begin to emerge. Nevertheless, a lot more is needed as some of the transpiring mobility solutions have not yet reached the market, making the corresponding behaviour changes imponderable. In this context, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a review on how travel behaviour changes linked to the deployment of new mobility solutions have been considered in travel demand models. The new mobility solutions studied include carsharing, dynamic ridesharing, micromobility sharing services, and personal and shared autonomous vehicles. An overview and comparison of relevant studies implementing activity or trip-based demand models and other methodologies are presented. The analysis shows that the results of the different studies heavily depend on the extent to which behavioural changes are considered. The results of the review thus point to the need for holistic demand models that carefully mimic the urban reality with everything it has to offer and account for the importance of individual traits in the decision-making processes. Such models need an in-depth understanding of the microscopic mechanisms leading to the travel behaviour shifts linked to the most innovative mobility solutions. To achieve this level of detail, mobility living labs and their real-life experiments and experience with citizens, which are flourishing in Europe, are suggested to play a crucial role in the years to come.