Public bus services are widely deployed in cities around the world because they provide cost-effective and economic public transportation. However, from a passenger point of view urban bus systems can be complex and difficult to navigate, especially for disadvantaged users, i.e. tourists, novice users, older people, and people with impaired cognitive or physical abilities. We present Urban Bus Navigator (UBN), a reality-aware urban navigation system for bus passengers with the ability to recognize and track the physical public transport infrastructure such as buses. Unlike traditional location-aware mobile transport applications, UBN acts as a true navigation assistant for public transport users. Insights from a six-month long trial in Madrid indicate that UBN removes barriers for public transport usage and has a positive impact on how people feel about public transport journeys.@en

There is huge potential in increasing the value of public transportation by creating novel travel information systems which are centred on the individual transport user. Especially, in dense urban cities where it is hard to oversee complex transport networks that are subject to frequent changes, maintenance and construction works, travellers want to be proactively notified about disruptions and traffic incidents relevant to their future behaviour. In this paper, we show how to mine characteristic patterns of the transport routines of urban bus riders for the design of novel travel information system that have the ability to understand forthcoming travel needs of individual users. We leverage on travel histories collected from automated fare collection system (AFC) to extract features of personal transport usage and study their predictive power to forecast whether people access public transport services on a future day or not.@en

In order to increase the attractiveness of public transport systems, information technology has great potential to add value to their usage. In particular, the availability of digital sources of behavioural transport data opens up new directions for the development of transport information services which are focused on the passengers' engagement in public transport. This will enable novel perceptions of transport services, encompassing aspects of personal transport behaviour - information related to the transport routines of individual travellers, social transport behaviour - information which creates an understanding of the collective transport usage of social groups - And dimensions of quality-of-transport information which include novel measures of travel experiences such as overcrowding. In this paper, we introduce and discuss a design space of how behavioural transport data can shape more user-centric transport information services in order to inform future research activities in this area.@en