Travel information centre and mobility marketing

Summary

Coimbra wishes to offer more and better information on mobility and travel plans for citizens and visitors. The municipality has set up an Infomobility Centre that provides real-time travel information and services for public transport in the metropolitan area of Coimbra by congregating all the regional transport operators, such as bus operators and the national rail service.

Implementing sustainable mobility

In recent years, the number of public transport passengers has been steadily decreasing in Coimbra. The new infomobility Centre will optimise travel information and services and provide people with several transport options. Also, a web system will also be used to collect data that will feed into future corrections and improvements on travel services according to users’ needs. Another function the infomobility Centre will take on is to promote public transport through informative campaigns targeted young people and their families.

The main objective of the measure is to:

• Provide information on the fastest, most inexpensive and sustainable means of transport;
• Make public transport more attractive;
• Increase the use of public transport; and
• Reduce car traffic.

Progress

After an initial planning and project development stage that lasted until mid 2009, the Coimbra Infomobility Centre was inaugurated on September 15th 2009. The Centre began functioning with at least 1 worker in permanence during 12 working hours on week days. Presently, the Centre runs with 2 staff personnel simultaneously from 07:30 until 19:30 (weekdays) and with one staff member from 08:00 to 13:00 on Saturdays.

The Infomobility Centre provides services for several different PT operators: Public Municipal Urban Transportation Services of Coimbra (SMTUC), regional private bus operators, and national rail service (CP). This integrated approach allows form the Centre to provide information and tickets sales and services for all the PT operators in the region and provide other products and services concerning the local and regional mobility.

The Centre has also been a point of reference for many local mobility initiatives. Besides the launching of mobility promotional campaigns and hosting of press conferences, in the 2011 European Car Free Day it also served as the locale for the launching ceremony of the new e-ticketing system. Afterwards, the Mayor also gave the kick-off in bike and car sharing demonstration.

The Centre also served as the initial operational setting for the RUMOS trip planner. Developed in Coimbra’s participation the CIVITAS project, RUMOS was initially available at the Centre. However, in mid-2011 it was launched on the internet and has registered an incremental increase in users.

Outcomes

The demonstration of the measure within the CIVITAS MODERN period showed that this measure is feasible at a relatively low cost in comparison to those of other PT operations.

The demonstration of the measure resulted in a short period of time in an increase of the awareness level of population, and also in the increase of the acceptance level of the users and in the level of the quality of PT service. The results demonstrated that the acceptance level of the measure is very high (95% in 2011) and 95,1% were satisfied or very satisfied with the service provided by the Infomobility Centre in 2011. The acceptance level of the public transport operators was 100% in all the surveys carried out.

In 2011 the Infomobility Centre registered 34.040 customers (an average of 2.836 per month). There are 4688 accesses to “RUMOS” trip planner per month, greatly exceeding the 1500 accesses that were initially foreseen.

With the implementation of the measure we learnt that:

• Risk management is important taking into consideration that licensing procedures, linked to the centre location (in the historic centre), could be time a consuming activity, Rigorous planning and follow-up of the process is fundamental;

• The involvement of the municipality is critical to achieving commitments among all stakeholders, as well as in the negotiation process concerning the financial issues;

• Promoting meetings about good practices on sustainable mobility and urban development is of paramount importance in order to involve all the stakeholders;

• It is essential in the implementation of a trip planner to involve the developers of the systems during all the stages to know exactly what is needed and required in the initial specification stage, including system interoperability, which is increasingly important as more PT operators are included within the system