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Passengers’ activities during short trips on the London Underground

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Abstract

The present study considers underground passengers and investigates the ways in which they spend their time during a trip of average length or shorter. Using a structured procedure that had been refined after a preliminary study, more than 1,700 passengers were observed in London. The results showed that even when the length of travel is very short (2–6 stops), underground passengers engage in several occupations, especially those involving the use of mobile Information and Communication Technologies. These occupations depend on the specific spatial and temporal conditions of the travel, as well as on gender and age. These results should be useful in designing travel services that enhance passengers’ experiences; they also suggest a criterion for comparing trips using different transportation modes (i.e., looking at the time point during the trip at which the ratio of active versus passive occupations changes).

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Notes

  1. There were limited possibilities to distinguish among certain kinds of devices, so mobile phones and PDA, which look similar from a distance, were considered in one category. “Headphones” indicated that passengers were wearing headphones connected to an unidentified device; the nature of that device, for the sake of this study, was disambiguated by the action performed with it.

  2. Although the Borough of Camden as a whole is quite heterogeneous, the area surrounding Hampstead station is wealthy, as is demonstrated by data reported in the 2001 Census Key Statistics (http://www.camden.gov.uk/ccm/cms-service/stream/asset/?asset_id=87114). According to these data, Hampstead Town has the highest percentage of residents occupying higher managerial (9 %) or higher professional (19 %) positions as compared to the other wards (down to 2 and 5.9 %, respectively). Moreover, the percentage of residents living in housing association homes is only 2.6 % compared to the average of the borough (11.4 %).

  3. http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk.

  4. http://conversation.which.co.uk/transport-travel/do-you-want-mobile-coverage-on-london-underground/.

  5. http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/856120-mobile-signal-coming-to-tube-as-huawei-offers-to-supply-technology.

  6. http://www.mobilephonexchange.co.uk/news/post/2010/10/06/New-York-To-Get-Phone-Signal-On-Subway.aspx.

  7. Although they relied on a different method than the one adopted in the present study, these studies examined activities and artifacts used by the passengers of a public transportation mode and included trips of approximately the same length (15 and 20 min, respectively) as an average trip on a single car of the underground (12.7 min). In addition, the present study did not involve standing passengers, whose behavior would not have been comparable to the behavior of passengers sitting on a train.

  8. The relationship between the trip on the underground and the entire travel experience before and after it can partly explain the reason why men used more ICTs than women. According to the findings of some studies, men take one-purpose trips, whereas women take multi-purpose trips on less comfortable transportation modes (Jones et al. 1983), travel fewer miles daily (Giuliano and Narayan 2003) and are less likely to commute long distances (Cambridge Econometrics 2005).

  9. http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/metro/11584.aspx.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Patricia Mokhtarian and the three anonymous reviewers for the quality of the feedback provided to earlier versions of this paper and for the thoughtfulness of their comments.

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  1. Sarah Furlan

    Present address: Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Padova, via Venezia, 8, 35131, Padua, Italy

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human Technologies Laboratories (HTLab), Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, via Venezia, 8, 35131, Padua, Italy

    Luciano Gamberini, Anna Spagnolli, Nicola Corradi & Sarah Furlan

  2. Psychology Department, Goldsmiths University of London, London, SE14 6NW, UK

    Andrea Miotto & Eva Ferrari

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  1. Luciano Gamberini
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Correspondence to Anna Spagnolli.

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Gamberini, L., Spagnolli, A., Miotto, A. et al. Passengers’ activities during short trips on the London Underground. Transportation 40, 251–268 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-012-9419-4

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