Examining gender differences of social media use for activity planning and travel choices

Background: The explosive growth of social media has rendered them powerful communication channels. User generated content is an important source of inspiration and influence among web friends, it generates new activities and consequently affects mobility decisions. Whether to visit a place, or how to get to a place of interest are decisions that can be triggered through people’s interactions on social media. Objective: The main objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of social media use on activity planning and travel arrangements for women and men. Methods: An online survey was conducted to examine the social media use and the impact of the shared content for women and men, on the phase before any activity in an urban environment. Inferential statistics were applied to detect gender differences in a sample size comprised of 804 respondents. Result: The significant results showed that the variables gender and social media use for activity planning and travel arrangements are associated with each other. Results have also indicated that the influence of reviews and ratings, photos/ videos and proposed transport mode on activity planning is gender dependent. Photos/ videos influence more often both women (m=3.47) and men (m=3.00) than reviews and ratings (m=3.21 for women and 2.94 for men). Both these contents influence more than proposed transport mode (m=2.62 and 2.37 for women and men). Conclusion: The analysis of the results indicated that before an activity, both women and men tend to use majorly social media for activity planning and travel arrangements, while photos/videos influence women’s decisions more often than men.Travel arrangements of the majority of respondents would be influenced by a post of a designated account related to transport. Finally, social media use affects travel arrangements of both women and men more before performing an activity rather than during. © 2020, The Author(s)

A thorough review of big data sources and sets used in transportation research

The development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and the Internet provide Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) with a huge amount of real-time data. These data are the so-called “Big Data” which can be collected, interpreted, managed and analyzed in a proper way in order to improve the knowledge around the transport system. The use of these technologies has greatly enhanced the efficiency and user friendliness of ITS, providing significant economic and social impacts, contributing positively to the management of sustainable mobility. In this paper, different sources of big data that have been used in ITS are presented, while their advantages and limitations are further discussed. Analytically, big data sources that have been used within the last 10 years are identified. Then, a review of current applications is done, in order to disclose the most used and proper data source per case. Aim of the present study is to improve the knowledge around the usage of big data in transport planning and to contribute to the better support of ITS, by providing a roadmap to decision makers for big data collection methods. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018

Investigating the Travel Information-Seeking Behavior for Daily Trips in a Greek Medium Sized City

The deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have created new options for travel information seeking. Dissemination of travel information to travelers could have immediate benefits such as reduction of travelers’ uncertainty, congestion alleviation, reduction of travel time and cost. However, daily trips in a medium sized city are often based on habitual patterns and not on received travel information. By addressing the factors that urge the users to access travel information in a medium sized city, an information provision strategy could be developed, to serve the needs of the commuters and improve the daily traffic situation. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the factors that affect the travel information seeking in the urban environment of Volos city, in Greece. A digital questionnaire was formulated to investigate the seeking of travel information for daily trips and its impact on commuters’ mobility and travel choices. The final sample size comprised 108 users. The analysis of the data was done through descriptive and inferential statistics. Results showed that online sources of travel information are more preferable by the respondents. Moreover, information about traffic congestion or rerouting is often used by non-sustainable mode users, while sustainable mode users are more interested in information about public transport itineraries. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Investigating the role and potential impact of social media on mobility behavior

Social media are considered as a major communications channel for information exchange, opinion statement, social network enabling, decisions influencing and business promotion. New activities can be triggered by web friends and followers, as a mutual trust on choices is developed during peoples’ interactions on social media. Visited places, attended events, bought merchandise that are disseminated on the web turn into possible attractors for others to visit, attend and buy, thus affecting individual’s travel preferences and behavior. The impact of social media in travel/mobility decisions is the main objective of this paper. A digital questionnaire was formulated to investigate the degree of social media usage in terms of type of information searched, reached and shared, time of information and purpose for which the information was created. The final sample size comprised 237 users and was grouped according to gender (women-men) and occupation (students - full-time job). In addition, statistical analysis results that were based on this grouping are included and further described in this paper. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Urban traffic management utilizing soft measures: A case study of Volos city

This paper examines the current and the future performance of the traffic network around the center of the city of Volos in Greece, after the implementation of local traffic management measures and the introduction of innovative Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services. The study focuses on the urban road of two main streets Iasonos (up to Fillelinon street) and Dimitriados (section between Fillelinon and Athanasiou Diakou streets) where during the peak hours, congestion results in high delays, bottlenecks and conflicts. System performance is based on specific indicators, which have been set to evaluate the traffic situation in the three main areas of interest: traffic quality, safety and environment. An investigation on the current and potential problems of the study area has been performed, by modeling the current situation (base scenario) in the microsimulation software VISSIM and using the “Surrogate Safety Assessment Model” (SSAM) to assess the traffic safety. The findings were low quality of signal control, low compliance of drivers to traffic laws (illegal and unregulated parking, trespassing of the bus lane), critical safety hotspots and increased emissions. “Soft” countermeasures are simulated and evaluated in VISSIM. Such “soft” countermeasures are the ban of access to Urban Freight Transport (UFT) vehicles during the peak hours, the adoption of ITS to prevent illegal parking, the adjustment of the coordination time offset. Apart from evaluating the impact of the countermeasures, the paper constitutes also a roadmap for achieving overall improvement of an urban traffic network without resulting into the construction of new transport infrastructure. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Validating Urban Freight Deliveries Through Traffic Microsimulation: An Experimental Study

Traffic microsimulation tools have been extensively used in evaluating urban freight transport systems. Aim of this paper is to develop a city wide urban traffic model that integrates the daily freight trips of a private courier company on the basis of a typical day. To achieve this, the traffic model is calibrated and validated based on travel time data from Volos’ taxis GPS devices. The validated traffic model is then enriched by freight vehicles’ routes in form of public transport lines so as to integrate the rest vehicular traffic with the considered freight traffic. Freight data were given by “ELTA Courier” company which provides door-to-door deliveries in the city of Volos, Greece. The produced model simulated the freight trips of six freight vehicles, four motorbikes and two minivans, performing 199 delivery stops in the examined typical day, during 09:00–20:00. The development of the urban freight traffic model is demonstrated through the case study of Volos, providing useful insights. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Campaigns and awareness-raising strategies on sustainable urban mobility

The increasing demand for urban mobility in modern cities leads to traffic congestion and other environmental and societal impacts, requiring a shift to more sustainable mobility behavior. However, travelers are not well informed about the possible sustainable modes and their advantages, as traffic education is often limited to learning traffic rules. To raise awareness on sustainability, various techniques may be used, such as designated educational programs, training sessions, seminars and campaigns. Acknowledging the spread and popularity of social media, the aim of the paper is to investigate how a shift in behavior towards more sustainable modes of transportation may be affected by a digital campaign. The coherent production of a successful sustainable urban mobility campaign is a complex task and requires a thorough understanding of the general needs of those affected. Firstly, the paper reviews and analyses previous campaigns and strategies related to sustainable urban mobility implemented in European countries. Analysis includes the organization, which was responsible for initiating the campaign, the time period, theme, scope, target group and type of approach. In those cases, that evaluation of the campaign was conducted, impacts on attitudes and behavior are also identified and the success attributes of the campaigns are selected. In the context of further research, an on-line questionnaire survey was carried out for the identification of travelers’ preferences and attitudes towards innovative strategies that raise awareness in sustainable urban mobility, promoted and supported by social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.). © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Exploring the potential of social media content for detecting transport-related activities

The wide spread of social media encourages the users to share more often their activities as well as their location, leading to a rapid growth of the data volume. Current research retrieves this user-generated content on social media platforms in an effort to convert them into powerful tools, enabling transport related data collection. In this paper data from Twitter are retrieved and processed to explore their potential for providing transport related data. The main objective is to investigate the reliability of the transport related content retrieved from tweets and the transferability of analytics methods to other cities and languages. The research data set includes thousands of tweets collected in three cities: Minneapolis-Saint Paul twin cities (USA), Riga (Latvia), and Volos (Greece) in May–June 2018. Selection of the research areas is owed to substantially different environments in terms of population, language and transport infrastructure. The collected data were classified into five classes: General transport-related information, real-time information, complain, advice/question, unrelated to transport. Based on the obtained results, a cross comparison was made about efficiency of Twitter as a social media source of transport-related information in different urban environments. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019