Michael A. B. van Eggermond

Immersive technologies in transport research are gaining popularity, allowing for data collection in a controlled dynamic setting. Nonetheless, their ecological validity is still to be established hence their use in mathematical modelling in a transport setting has been scarce. We aim to fill this gap by conducting a study of cycling behaviour where non-immersive and immersive presentation methods are used in a virtual reality setting. The results confirm our hypothesis that participants behave differently when shown a choice scenario in non-immersive and immersive settings. In particular, cycling in an immersive setting is characterised by a higher degree of engagement. We also captured neural activity during task performance. We focussed on oscillations in the alpha (α) band where we found increased suppression in this signal in response to the immersive condition relative to the non-immersive. These results complement the behavioural findings and indicate that immersive environments may increase levels of task-engagement.

In this paper, we connect two notions of accessibility that are more often than not considered separately: pedestrian accessibility and transit accessibility. We move away from the notion of zonal accessibility and measure fine-grained accessibility using door-to-door travel times. Two pedestrian networks are compared to a baseline scenario considering Euclidean distances for a large metropolitan area in which each individual building is considered as an activity opportunity. It is shown that pedestrian accessibility to jobs differs when pedestrian distances are approximated with different networks that are more representative of reality. Stop-to-stop public transport travel times are extracted from an agent-based simulation of public transport smart card data. The effect of less-than-optimal connections from transit to the pedestrian network, a local measurement, can be seen when calculating the accessibility to all destinations in the city. We suggest moving away from Euclidean-based distance analyses. Limitations can be found in the data available; the connection of buildings to the network becomes important, as does the inclusion of pedestrian crossings. For an inclusive accessibility measure, it will be necessary to calculate generalized costs for pedestrians and generate different pedestrian networks that reflect the limitations of different user groups.