Passenger Behaviour, Terminal Design and Urban Surroundings for Attractive Public Transport

Public transport is vital to the mobility of a diverse array of users and helps addressing key societal challenges, particularly congestion, lack of urban space, and high greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, many cities struggle to achieve a high share of public transport and active travel modes. Poor urban planning and design decisions that do not address travelers' needs and preferences can act as a barrier against sustainable transport, resulting in e.g. inaccessible stations, time-consuming trips, unappealing walks or unsafe waiting and transfer periods. To ensure that stakeholders make informed decisions that enhance rather than undermine the appeal of public transport, we need to investigate what motivates travellers to choose public transport and explore how their experience can be improved.

This thesis addresses this problem by investigating the role of the urban built environment, particularly the design of stations and their surroundings, on three key indicators of travel behaviour and experiences. These include perceived safety, which can hinder travel if it is inadequate; mode choice, which reveals the determinants necessary for achieving a shift towards public transport and active travel modes; and satisfaction and emotional experiences, which are crucial to retaining travellers and contributing to their well-being. As travellers encounter various travel environments during the door-to-door journey, in which a single unpleasant environment can disrupt the overall experience, this thesis takes a holistic perspective within each theme, explicitly considering the diverse needs and expectations of travellers for each travel environment.

Five self-contained papers constitute the thesis, where Paper 1 is a literature review, Papers 2, 3, and 4 focus on the choice of, and experiences with public transport, and Paper 5 focuses on pedestrians’ experiences. Most of these papers rely on large-scale data to conduct quantitative analyses of the built environment, as well as travellers’ behavior and experiences across an entire region or city, providing a solid basis for translating the outcomes into policy and practice recommendations.

As public transport trips are highly complex, comprising diverse travel environments and vehicles, travellers can encounter various problems during the door-to-door journey. Paper 1 reviews public transport literature, particularly exploring where these problems arise and hinder a seamless travel experience, through two perspectives. The first perspective includes studies that focus on a single trip leg without linking them to the overall travel experience. These studies, for example, underscore the importance of ensuring travelers' safety and providing travel information at each trip leg. However, it is not possible to determine how the absence of these features might disrupt the overall travel experience. The second perspective presents studies that investigate the door-to-door journey, allowing an assessment of the relative significance of each trip leg, the interplay between them, and the problems that may arise. From this holistic perspective, ensuring reliability becomes a necessity for a seamless journey.

Rail networks are the backbone of urban travel, but their effectiveness relies on concentrating a solid passenger base around stations, supported by a carefully designed urban environment that ensures travellers perceive rail as an overall attractive travel alternative. Transit-oriented development (TOD) was proposed as an urban planning strategy for this purpose, with an additional emphasis on creating safe, pleasant and liveable neighbourhoods. Paper 2 investigates whether TOD influences travellers’ perceived safety at stations and mode choice in the Greater Copenhagen area. The analyses employed three unique data sources: i) site observations for TOD features, ii) a passenger satisfaction survey for perceived safety and iii) revealed trips from the Danish National Travel Survey for travel behaviour, to estimate linear regression and multinomial logistic regression models. These models revealed that travellers who feel safe at their home and activity stations are more likely to use public transport, and TOD has significant benefits for both enhancing perceived safety and encouraging a shift towards public transport, walking, and cycling. That said, station proximity and high service frequency, especially for the activity end, are also crucial in the choice of public transport. On the other hand, car-oriented infrastructure, such as park-and-ride lots at the activity end, can make driving more attractive while creating desolate areas around stations, thereby reducing travelers' perceived safety levels.

Travellers spend a high share of their public transport journey outside the vehicle. However, in the context of public transport satisfaction, these experiences have not received the same level of attention as system and in-vehicle features. Therefore, Paper 3 shifts the focus to the design of stations and their urban surroundings, delving into travelers' perceived safety and satisfaction in public transport. This study used data from a tailormade survey measuring travellers’ experiences in East Denmark and the built environment features that they encountered at both ends of their trips. A comprehensive structural equation model revealed that feeling safe is essential to travel environment satisfaction, which in turn enhances overall trip satisfaction. To enhance perceived safety, travel environments should provide clear wayfinding and a pleasant atmosphere with well-lit and clean surroundings, as well as preventing overcrowding. However, isolated areas or closed facades in surrounding buildings negatively influence travellers’ perceived safety. While all these features significantly influence travellers’ satisfaction with travel environments, maintenance, trees and greenery, shops, and urban life offer additional benefits. Among these features, wayfinding, lighting and isolated areas, in particular, indirectly influence overall trip satisfaction. These results underscore the importance of designing safe and attractive travel environments to enhance public transport satisfaction.

Travel experiences are highly subjective, and offering an inclusive public transport service requires further attention to individuals with specific needs. For perceived safety, gender is a highly influential aspect, as revealed by Paper 3, and it can shape different perceptions of built environment features. Paper 4 explores whether specific built environment features are more disruptive for certain gender groups by estimating linear regression models separately for each gender group and each trip end. Especially women and gender non-conforming individuals, who reported lower perceived safety levels compared to men, state the importance of providing good lighting conditions and avoiding isolated areas and closed facades at surrounding buildings in the survey. Regression models highlight that these features have a stronger impact on their perceived safety levels than men’s. That said, at the activity end, where travellers are likely to be less familiar with their surroundings, these features also have a greater impact on men. While improving isolated areas around stations can require some time, enhancing the lighting conditions help improve travellers’ perception in the meantime. These findings emphasise that stakeholders should be aware of their key user groups and consider their needs explicitly to avoid excluding them from public transport.

Public transport can be considered as an active travel mode as the majority of travelers have to walk during various stages of their journey. Investigating pedestrians’ experiences from a broader perspective can enhance the attractiveness of walking in its own right, while contributing to the experience of walking trips within the public transport journey. Therefore, Paper 5 examines the role of the street-level built environment futures on pedestrians’ emotional experiences. It contributes to pedestrian research with an application of the circumplex model of affect, measuring and comparing pedestrians’ experiences across various walking environments in a structured manner, and investigating the features which offer more positive experiences. Mixed logistic regression models revealed that enhancing the quality of buildings and facades (e.g. diverse and transparent facades, activities in the ground level), and urban surroundings (e.g. enhancing social life, providing street furniture and greenery) are especially associated with more pleasant and relaxing walking experiences. In the longer term, these changes can encourage more walking, while benefiting public transport users who frequent the same routes on their way to and from stations.

In summary, this thesis provides empirical evidence on the importance of designing safe and attractive travel environments to make public transport an appealing travel alternative in cities and to provide a seamless journey for various user groups. These findings lead to several recommendations for policy and practice. Planning the catchment area around stations efficiently is critical to the shift towards public transport. Particularly, prioritising dense residential and commercial development in close proximity to stations is more efficient than park-and-ride facilities to attract passengers. In addition to densities and distances, more attention needs to be paid to the quality of stations and their surroundings. Well-lit, green and clean streets with transparent and interesting facades are essential for ensuring that travellers have a safe and pleasant walk to the station, while encountering isolated areas is especially disruptive to women and gender non-conforming individuals. Good lighting, maintenance, and cleanliness are also key to a safe and smooth wait at stations, along with wayfinding.

While these enhancements are likely to benefit most travellers, policymakers and practitioners should bear in mind that individual characteristics, such as gender or familiarity with one’s surroundings, may bring forward specific needs and built environment features that can address them. In this context, prioritising the more urgent needs and planning improvements at a larger scale could minimise the risk of excluding certain groups and encountering unsafe and unpleasant travel environments along the door-to-door journey. Stakeholders involved in designing and maintaining travel environments should closely collaborate from the initial planning phases through to daily maintenance, to ensure that travellers have a safe and seamless experience door-to-door.