Tiago Camacho

BSc and MSc (Computer Science) University of Madeira, MACM

Urban Rail In-Vehicle Activities – The Role of Technology in Facilitating Passengers’ Experiences

Public transport is seen as central in addressing sustainability and liveability issues within urban environments due to its ability to reduce congestion levels and promote healthier and more integrative communities. Rail is a particularly significant mode of public transport, given that it is not only one of the most widely used modes, but further due toits role in connecting journeys that span across different modes.

Despite its established relevance, public transport still lags behind when it comes to captivate individuals and sway them away from their private vehicles. Passengers gauge their experiences as they interact with the service based on a series of cognitive and affective assessments. Hence, aspects of the service beyond functionality, such as face-to-face interaction and in-vehicle activities, impact perceptions towards the service. In-vehicle activities in particular gained recent attention, given their ability to influence affective states and lead to more involving and engaging journeys.

This work is a study on how technology, as a mediating tool, can be used to shape in-vehicle activities in urban rail. In particular, this work delves into the design and evaluation of TrainYarn, a tailored mobile application that enables anonymous and co-located social interaction to take place between urban rail passengers. This study further looks at scrutinising the results attained by TrainYarn, and compare them to existing solutions in order to assess the role that technology can play in enhancing public transport and propelling what I refer to as passenger-centric innovation.

The outcomes of this study are twofold. The first outcome is providing empirical evidence to highlight the relevance of considering social interaction as a meaningful in-vehicle activity, one that aligns with existing underlying needs and values of particular types of passengers. This outcome further challenges existing assumptions about the anti-social role that technology brings to public transport. Instead, and when tailored according to context, technology has the ability of being socially emancipatory, whilst still maintaing social boundaries and cultural etiquette. The second outcome relates to the necessity to move beyond the current worldview of looking at public transport solely from its functional perspective. I argue that much like individuals create affective and symbolic connections with their private vehicles, so do they with public transport. To this extent, it becomes essential to explore new ways to capitalise on the inherent strengths of public transport.

Biography

Tiago has a Software Engineering background, holding a set of skills for designing, modelling, and constructing software systems. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD studies in the field of Urban Informatics. He is being sponsored by the CRC (Cooperative Research Centre) for Rail Innovation along with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia.
His interests are currently focused in the increasing role that new technologies have to play in offering more engaging journey experiences to train passengers. Looking beyond the sole utilitarian examples of IT in public transport, such as real-time passenger information systems, Tiago is looking at better understanding new ways to promote engagement with passengers by exploring the affective dimension of the overarching in-vehicle journey experience.

Previously, Tiago was an Assistant Researcher (2009-2011) with the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute in Portugal, as well as a Visiting Researcher (2010) with the Center for Internet Excellence at the University of Oulu in Finland.

Follow Tiago on twitter: @TransitUX

Supervisors

• Assoc. Prof.  Marcus Foth (Principal)
• Prof. Andry Rakotonirainy (Associate)