Edinburgh Napier University

  Provision of Real-Time Passenger Information (RTPI) is increasingly becoming a fundamental element of the service offered by transit agencies. RTPI changes the way in which travellers perceive public transport services and it can have remarkable consequences on travel choices and eventually on system performances. Such consequences depend on the objectives pursued by the riders and the characteristics of the transit service. We extend the existing knowledge on transit RTPI by studying the decision-making process of bus passengers in the presence of multichannel descriptive and prescriptive real-time information. We investigate use of different kinds of information, decision-making objectives, travel choices, and their associations (defining what we call classes of travel choice behaviour) through a survey of Lothian Buses passengers in Edinburgh. We observe that descriptive RTPI is largely accessed also before travelling and it influences above all the decisions concerning route choice. Our analysis demonstrates that RTPI is associated to more flexible behaviour, and that there are well-defined classes of behaviour. Our results emphasise the importance to transit agencies of providing RTPI tailored to their customers. We recommend the development of models including the effects of RTPI in order to assess its impact in terms of system performance.