The aim of this project is to evaluate the quality of public accessibility of mountain regions covered by Zuugle and thereby identify "blind spots" of public transport coverage. The analyses includes two perspectives:
1) The perspective of city dwellers as the Zuugle target group, for whom the evaluations show the mountain areas/hiking tours that are particularly accessible from their home public transport station. These analyses represent an additional feature that can be integrated into the Zuugle website to provide users with map-based inspiration on particularly well-accessible areas.
2) The perspective of 2-3 selected tourism destinations, which will use the results to gain a better picture of public transport-based target groups or regions. In addition, the analyses of this project allow for in-depth insights into the intra-destination public transport quality between tourist centers (with high hotel/accommodation density) and interesting hiking or other outdoor areas within the destinations (keyword on-site mobility).
Smart Mobility Hubs as Game Changers in Transport (SmartHubs)
The SmartHubs projects examines mobility hubs, dedicated on-street locations where citizens can choose from different shared and sustainable mobility options. The main objective is to assess if a co-designed user-centric development can enable mobility hubs to act as a game changer towards sustainable urban mobility and accessibility. SmartHubs will examine, develop and apply research methods and tools in four SmartHubs Living Labs in Belgium (Brussels), the Netherlands (Rotterdam-the Hague), Germany (Munich) and Austria (Vienna and Seestadt aspern). SmartHubs will develop and apply novel participatory and impact assessment tools (i) an open accessibility tool involving inputs from individual citizens to examine the local accessibility impacts of mobility hubs, (ii) an accessibility network analysis and resilience tool to examine the impacts of mobility hubs on transport network resilience, (iii) a multi-actor multi-criteria analysis method is used and extended to involve individual citizens and (iv) 3D visualization, augmented reality and gaming will be used to facilitate co-creation processes of mobility hub design. Finally, SmartHubs will conduct rigorous research on a broad range of mobility, accessibility, vulnerability, resilience and societal impacts of mobility hubs (including environmental, equity, gender, and transport poverty impacts) which go beyond the current state of the art.
Within the frame of the overall project, the content of the public transport search engine "Zuugle" is to be developed and programmed. While work packages 1 and 3 deal with technical aspects of programming, work package 2, subcontracted to BOKU, aims to investigate the needs of potential users in order to integrate them into the platform as early as possible. This work package tries to get the views of various different groups of people on the topic of sustainable travel to mountain sports areas for leisure purposes. In order to capture the different opinions and inspirations as best as possible, qualitative interviews and workshops will be conducted, which will allow an explorative approach with the greatest possible depth of content. This is chosen in tourism and mobility research especially when strongly divergent and partly unknown perceptions, attitudes and behaviour patterns are to be observed, which is expected in tour and public transport journey planning.
In the context of this work package, different groups of people will be interviewed who share an interest in mountain sports (hiking, via ferrata, mountain biking, etc.), but who differ in their affinity to the use of public transport (public transport users vs. car drivers or passengers) and socio-demographic characteristics. In order to cover different geographical conditions, the interviews were conducted in hiking areas of three different federal provinces (Lower Austria, Salzburg and Styria), with the corresponding main starting points (Vienna, Salzburg, Graz) as tour starting points.