Fight or flight

Phil Linnecor, director at Acorel, writes about the importance of building a level of trust between the passenger and the transport system

“Passengers and potential passengers have to constantly make decisions about how they travel and depending on their anxiety levels, the easiest option is not always the chosen route. As this may trigger a decision to wait two hours in a traffic jam, rather than spending 30 minutes on a train.

Even walking up to the end of a long ticket queue, can even trigger a decision to flee and find an alternative transport option. Although advances in e-ticketing have helped address this issue.

If we look how we ourselves travel, not all of us fully understand the geography of the countries we are travelling in and if we consider our own holiday travels, we might pick a less economical mode of transport or place our trust in the holiday booking company and hope they know where you are going.

In public transport, fight and flight can be trigger when the passenger or potential passenger feels like they are not in control; are we going to reach our destination, will it be crowded or evens crowds and queues. To address the feelings, a level of trust needs to be built up between the passenger and the transport system. The transport system relies on transport data and therefore, to help address anxiety you first need to trust the data.

At Acorel we create solutions to address passenger flow and provide accurate trustable data to enable transport authorities to make decisions on how passengers travel. Depending on the requirement, the data could look at how crowds are forming and by using artificial intelligence, we can predict when crowds will happen. These crowds could be on vehicles or within the transport hubs themselves and with our latest technologies we can look at the surroundings and environmental conditions to help predict more long-term accurate data. With long-term being 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 day, month etc. Since the earlier you can detect a problem, the less anxiety passengers will face.

For passengers our solutions provide an insight on the condition of the vehicle and transport hub. If you avoid supermarkets at the busiest time of the day, then you might want to avoid the transport system during those times and by your transport authority sharing their data, enables you to be more in control of your own travel patterns.”

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