Reducing the stress of using public transport

Pete Davis and Dr Russ Marshall

From 'The Ergonomist', July 2009

The use of public transport can be a stressful experience, especially if you’re making a journey for the first time. There are so many uncertainties such as knowing which bus or train to take, the location of bus stops or platforms, the time the bus or train leaves; whether you have enough money; whether connections will be made in time; and so on. Uncertainties cover every element of a journey and whilst most can be minimised through planning, and detailed, up-to-date information about services, many have to be managed en-route. This management requires a degree of adaptability, to be able to modify a journey to overcome some form of barrier. For older people or people with disabilities there may be additional concerns combined with a reduced ability to adapt. Issues such as the presence of steps at a station; whether there is a lift; appropriate accessibility (level access, hand rails, etc.) to the train or bus; how to tell if the correct train has been boarded; if there are locations to sit and rest; and the potential for contributing factors such as heavy crowds all add to the potential for stress.

All of these uncertainties can be collectively called ‘anticipatory stressors’, and they have the potential to cause stress even before a journey starts. One potential response to this stress, particularly for those who have an alternative or for whom the journey is not a necessity, is to avoid making the journey altogether. Therefore people can experience exclusion from public transport even if they are capable of using it. Even on a familiar journey, there are a host of potential stressors that may be encountered. Activities like crossing roads, using ticket machines, negotiating ticket barriers, steps, escalators and lifts, reading and hearing information, and getting on and off vehicles, can all be ‘acute stressors’ depending on an individual’s abilities and experience. Similarly, environmental factors such as noise, crowds, isolation, litter, graffiti and the movement of a travelling vehicle are all ‘ambient stressors’ that affect different people to a greater or lesser extent.

What all of these stressors have in common is their inconsistency. All of them have the potential to range from unnoticeable to catastrophic depending on the conditions encountered on a particular journey. At its best, public transport can be an affordable, sustainable and liberating mechanism for social inclusion. However, the stress of travel is a genuine health risk, and commuters show increases in psychological and physical illness. This risk increases if the journey is more complicated. It has been shown that it is not duration or distance, but the ‘impedance to travel’ that has a direct link to stress; i.e. a person travelling a long distance on a mainline train will be less stressed than someone travelling across a city with several changes. The more stages there are in a journey, the more stressors are likely to be encountered. It is therefore essential to eliminate the stressors that make travel problematic for so many people. As part of the AUNT-SUE project, Loughborough University is developing two tools that apply this stressor elimination philosophy to improving public transport.

The Inclusive Journey Planner
Existing online journey planners can go a long way to reducing uncertainty about a journey. Just knowing when and where vehicles depart may be enough for most people to set off on a journey without a prohibitive level of anticipatory stress. The aim of the Inclusive Journey Planner is to demonstrate the extent to which the use of a journey planner prior to travel could eliminate pre-travel uncertainty for all users, including those who are disadvantaged by disability or circumstance. Interviews and trials with a range of inexperienced users based around existing journey planners and proposed design improvements, has lead to a number of recommendations that are largely encompassed by three main design concepts: Personal Profiles, Genuine Journey Choice and Rich Journey Plans.

Although many existing journey planners offer a number of ‘advanced options’ that can be used to customise a journey search, the approach seems to be one of providing every single option, then, realising that most people won’t want to look through them all, designing the layout so users can ignore them easily. Personal Profiles is a means to support users by exposing them to a relatively small list of the most relevant options to ensure only suitable journeys are provided. Enabling the user to personalise and then save their options for future use means that most users will only have to do this once in order to get personalised accessible journeys every time.

The journey options that existing journey planners provide are very limited, commonly just repetitions of one or two routes at different times. Given that the user has specified their time of travel, this is not especially helpful. A Genuine Journey Choice system would present alternative routes that suit the Personal Profile at the required time and give essential information about each route: modes, duration, cost and walking time (see image below). This allows the user to make a rational decision about which way they would prefer to make the journey. A good journey planner, such as the Transport for London Journey Planner, shows where there are steps, escalators, lifts and ramps and provides maps. The addition of showing level access to vehicles, warnings about likely crowding, extra information about stations and even weather forecasts would be welcomed by many users. Using dynamic web design can help to deliver such Rich Journey Plans without overloading the screen, enabling the user to get the information they need to travel with confidence.

The prototype Inclusive Journey Planner will be made available as an exemplar along with the results of the trials and guidance documentation. AUNT-SUE is also actively seeking to assist transport organisations in the design of journey planners that reduce stress and promote inclusion.

The HADRIAN Journey Stresstimator
HADRIAN is an extension to the SAMMIE 3D Human Modelling system. The purpose of HADRIAN is to carry out virtual user trials using models based on a varied sample of real people rather than population data. This allows practitioners to look at how people with different sizes, shapes, abilities and behaviours interact with products and environments. In addition to physical data, the HADRIAN Database includes information about activities at home, in urban environments and on transport, creating a rich profile of each of the 102 participants. Using this information it is possible to predict the level of stress that each participant would experience as a result of common acute and ambient stressors that occur whilst using public transport. The HADRIAN Journey Stresstimator is a spreadsheet-based application that enables a transport practitioner to interrogate these stress levels for any known journey. It effectively sends all of the participants on a journey and records every stress transaction providing results that can be used in many different ways. A practitioner could compare the inclusiveness of different routes, find out which people are most likely to be excluded, see which stages in a journey cause most stress, find out which stressors are causing the most stress and explore the effect that eliminating different stressors would have on a journey.

Whilst using the Journey Stresstimator is no substitute for thorough accessibility auditing, it may prove useful as a quick way to identify and prioritise opportunities for improvement. Because HADRIAN enables this analysis to be based on the real concerns of real people, it is also unique in its ability to deliver an empathic understanding of the importance of problems that might otherwise be overlooked.