The Viatic concept: Information technology for intelligent travellers

In the field of mobility, we are nowadays witnessing a change in forms of travel. There is a diversification and ¿home-to-work¿ is not the major form of travel anymore. There are more and more ¿home-to-leisure¿ journeys and ¿other reasons¿. On the one hand, commuting requires less information to assess known trips, on the other hand, occasional journeys require a lot of information and can lead to uncertainty. In this case, private cars are mostly used as a means of transport. In view of this, information services play an important role as they can reduce the uncertainty and contribute to the guarantee of a better balance between mass transit modes and private cars. Enhancing public transport and other green alternatives to private vehicles is the objective of sustainable mobility, part of the intelligent transport scheme. The principal success factor is to provide improved value services to citizens and customers who become ¿intelligent travellers¿. The Viatic concept, developed by INRETS, can be a part of the answer to the problem of sustainable mobility. The solution proposed by the Viatic project is a complete system of information: innovative pieces of street furniture in multimodal hubs and interactive screens on board, for access to transport and city information. This information can be read on the spot or sent to a mobile phone (SMS) or downloaded on a PDA. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the use of information technology (IT) can contribute to responding to travellers´ expectations. But the added value of anthropological studies can improve these information services more.