Browsing by Subject "Information and communication technologies"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Information, communication, travel behavior and accessibility
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2013) Van Wee, Bert; Geurs, Karst; Chorus, Casper
    Over the past two decades many papers have been published on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on travel behavior, but the literature focusing on the impact of ICT on accessibility is relatively scarce. In this paper we give an overview of the impact of ICT on four components of accessibility as distinguished by Geurs and van Wee (2004): (1) the land-use component, (2) the transportation component, (3) the temporal component, and (4) the individual component. Conclusions are that first much more literature exists on the potential impacts of ICT on travel behavior than on its impact on accessibility. Second, we argue that ICT potentially has an impact on all four components of the concept of accessibility. Literature exists on the direct impacts but fails to incorporate impacts due to the interactions between the accessibility components. Third, there seems to be a major challenge in developing accessibility measures and indicators that include ICT, including those that measure the utility of accessibility. Fourth, in the area of ICT’s impact on travel behavior, many research gaps exist. Examples are the impact of ICT on overall activity and trip patterns, the impact of ICT on activities and trips at the household and social-network level, ICT as a means of avoiding congestion or mitigating its effects, and the role of the phenomenon of self-selection in the context of ICT use. Finally, a major challenge is to develop models for activities, including ICT-impacts, which combine high levels of behavioral realism with (econometric) tractability.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Viewpoint: Transport's digital age transition
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2015) Lyons, Glenn
    2014 marks the 25th birthday of the World Wide Web. We have seen some remarkable developments as part of the digital age revolution in the last quarter of a century. These have taken place concurrently with a motor age that is possibly past its prime. A number of major motor manufacturers have faced disappointing sales or financial crisis alongside several countries seeing a halt to the historic trend of growing car use. The co-existence of the motor age and the digital age prompts this paper to consider the hypothesis that society is undergoing a fundamental transition from a regime of automobility to something significantly different. The paper considers what has characterized the motor age and proceeds to examine the digital revolution and how this is changing people’s means to access people, goods, services and opportunities. The range of interactions between the motor age and the digital age are addressed, underlining the difficulty in establishing the net consequence of one for the other. The new debates concerning ‘peak car’ are considered in which the digital age is identified as potentially one key factor responsible for observed changes in car use. The paper then focuses upon a sociotechnical conceptualization of society known as the Multilayer Perspective to examine its hypothesis. Support or not for the hypothesis is not, as yet, established. Transport’s future in the digital age is uncertain and the paper sets out some views on resulting policy considerations and research needs.