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A user of urban mobility systems interacts with many products and services while heading to some destination. However, the design of urban mobility systems does not usually rely on a door-to-door representation of the traveler experience. Human-centered design represents a relevant way to bring together the views of urban mobility stakeholders in designing integrated mobility systems that meet travelers’ wants and needs. However, generic human-centered models and methods are not adapted to urban mobility specificities and do not integrate the door-to-door product and service experience of a traveler including his/her activities within a city. This has repercussions on design practice such as sampling, scaling, setting performance indicators, gathering and analyzing qualitative data, involving stakeholders, and setting the boundaries of the system to be designed. For designers and transport operators, these are not obvious to set when it comes to design complex systems, at the scale of a city, which are anchored in the urban life. This thesis aims at developing a model of traveler experience to assist the diagnosis of travel problems in urban mobility systems. Combining the views of user experience (UX) design and transportation, it addresses the following research questions: Q1: How can traveler experience be modeled to feed travel problems diagnosis? Q2: What are the problems travelers experience using urban mobility systems? Q3: What is the effect of a traveler-centered stimulus on travel problem generation effectiveness? Q4: How can specific traveler attributes improve transport modeling and simulation? A conceptual model is first proposed based on human-centered and transportation literature, observations of four urban areas, six interviews, and three workshops. It describes and analyzes different facets of traveler experience and proposes a conceptual setting for problems that travelers face when they interact with an urban mobility system. The model illustrates how the traveler interacts, at different scales with mobility technical systems, and how situations from the urban context can provoke a shift from an expected to a real travel scenario. A case study is conducted to illustrate the use of the conceptual model in identifying travel problems for a demand-responsive transport service. It shows a need for predefined categories of problems when identifying causation of problems declared by users. A taxonomy of travel problems is then proposed to complete the missing categories in the conceptual model. It is based on a grounded theory approach using interview scripts from three metropolises and codes them into twenty-two categories of travel problems. Moreover, it proposes a definition of travel problems that synthesizes the views of interviewees and a causality scheme that connects the travel problems categories. The categories cover both objective and subjective dimensions of how problems are perceived by travelers. A case study shows the value of having pre-defined problem categories in bringing deeper insight into mobility systems diagnosis. However, the conceptual model needed validation in a design activity. It was therefore simplified to fit the focus group format of travel problem generation. A textual stimulus is designed to help travelers generate varied and novel travel problems. An experiment is conducted with two control groups as a baseline for non-stimulated problem generation and two experimental groups that are provided with a traveler-centered stimulus. Results show that the stimulated groups generate novel problems with a greater variety than the non-stimulated ones, covering most of the traveler experience dimensions. These dimensions are translated into traveler specific attributes to enhance the accuracy of the determinants of modal shift. Finally, an online survey (457 responses) is conducted for the greater Paris region to estimate the population that is more likely to shift towards using shared autonomous transport services. Results show that, in addition to cost and value of time, the subjective satisfaction criteria play an important role in estimating a potential transport mode shift. Moreover, these criteria brought more accuracy to agent-based simulation of the population that could use autonomous vehicles (AVs) and better profiling to AVs-riders optimization models. The conceptual model has allowed to deepen traveler experience and travel problems understanding. Its different uses have allowed insightful diagnostics of several urban mobility systems. This was recognized by the industrial partners involved in this thesis’ research project.

Keywords:

urban mobility, traveler experience, travel problems, problem generation, human-centered design, grounded theory