Edinburgh Napier University

  The majority of states across Australia have a publicly funded traveller information service in operation. They clearly provide some benefits to the travelling public, but there has been limited reported analysis of user opinions of the services and even less reported analysis of user preferences for the type of information provided prior to service set up. Traveller information services are one of the Intelligent Transport Systems applications which can provide significant benefits to the travelling public in time saved, avoided congestion, reduced stress and the avoidance of unsafe conditions. When applied at a suitable scale, these benefits also offer an opportunity to reduce negative environmental impacts of transport, such as greenhouse gas emissions, in the short to medium term. To have these systems gain acceptance and be in use at a scale that will produce environmental benefits, demand-side analysis of user requirements is needed. This paper describes the application of stated choice based survey techniques to create a structure and set of tools for describing the responsiveness of travellers to a traveller information service. Using choice-based methods, we created a tool to demonstrate the methodology used to investigate the trade-offs and decision processes used by consumers in using such a product.