What do people know about their public transport options?: Investigating the memory representations of public transport through telephone interviews in a residential area of Stockholm, Sweden

• Published in: Transportation (Dordrecht) 2008-07, Vol.35 (4), p.519-538
• Main Author: Dziekan, Katrin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Buses; Cognitive models; Consumers; Economic Geography; Economics; Economics and Finance; Engineering Economics; Exact sciences and technology; Ground, air and sea transportation, marine construction; Inner city; Innovation/Technology Management; Knowledge; Logistics; Marketing; Memory; Metropolitan areas; Organization; Public transportation; Regional/Spatial Science; Statistical data; Studies; Travel; Urban areas
• ISSN: 0049-4488; 1572-9435
• DOI: 10.1007/s11116-008-9164-x

This paper studies the memory representations of residents regarding the public transport system in their city. Telephone interviews were conducted with a representative sample of 204 inhabitants in a selected residential inner-city area in Stockholm. Route knowledge questions, recognition tasks, free-recall tasks and estimations of service frequency were used to explore memory representations. The results showed that, in general, residents in metropolitan areas have good knowledge of the public transport options along well-known transport corridors. The memory representation of lesser-known transport corridors tends to be of a poorer quality. In the results presented here, the variables gender, age, employment status, level of education and car availability had no correlation with the quality of the memory representation, but experience increased knowledge. Although frequent users of public transport had a more detailed representation of the system, the less frequent users also had a considerable- and good-memory representation. An explorative hierarchy for representation of public transport lines in the memory is proposed. It is hypothesised that memory representations of a transport line can be affected by the following three factors: the extent to which a line is visible in the urban area, the straightness of the routes and whether or not stops are labelled, for example, by destination area. Simply put, these factors determine how well a person knows a line. It was found that people first remember a commuter train and a trunk bus line, followed by metro lines and suburban buses and finally normal inner-city buses with the poorest anchorage in memory.