Towards Designing Pre-Trip Traveler Information Systems: A Quantitative Evaluation

The progressing traffic collapse burdens the economy, the environment, and the traveler. In order to reduce the monetary, temporal, and individual costs produced by traffic, we need innovative multi-modal pre-Trip information systems (IS). Without multi-modal pre-Trip IS, planning individual mobility and selecting mobility options is still a pain point for many travelers. Hence, many travelers stick to habitual mobility behavior without weighing up different alternatives. Multi-modal solutions will, however, facilitate individual mobility planning by presenting alternatives proactively and thus reducing the cognitive load of modal and temporal choices. Since the integration of multi-modal mobility services in the everyday life of the end-user is still in its infancy stages, this paper focuses on the customer-centered development of multi-modal pre-Trip IS. Thereby, this paper described the implementation and evaluation (n = 174) of pragmatic (i.e., information-based) and hedonic (i.e., pleasure-oriented) features into a smart mirror prototype. The results of our regression analysis shows that both pragmatic and hedonic qualities and the users' experienced need fulfillment significantly predict the users' intention to use the prototype. In conclusion, our implementation and evaluation contributes to the further development of multi-modal pre-Trip IS. Our results contribute to our understanding of how to motivate travelers to use multi-modal mobility services and how we can reduce the travelers' cognitive load during the mobility-centered decision-making process.