Watching the great movie of Pantelis Voulgaris, one would consider that eventually, it is indeed “A Long Road”. Metaphorically speaking, it is often said that life is a long journey full of happiness and bitterness, as well as ups and downs. However, from a literal point of view, we are moving through the road network as a vital element of the urban web of everyday life. Streets bring us a breath closer to the things we love and strive for, while at the same time they remain the main transportation network of both people and goods.
There are some grossly, and sometimes, painful surveys on sustainability, design but most importantly on circulation hidden behind the operation -good or bad- of roads and intersections that serve our transportation. Digging a little deeper into the asphalt and the well-graded aggregates, we find nothing but ourselves. Considering that everything has a common starting and ending point, which has nothing to do with paving materials, it is certainly all about the road user’s psychology.
Transportation system is anthropocentric, meaning that in order to work efficiently, there must be an of estimation process of people’s behavior and activities: how does the layout and the infrastructure of the street affects the decision making of the drivers, which land uses attract most users and when stadiums, touristic resorts and workplace can be considered as good examples. Implementation of the desire for mobility, thus urban planner’s job, are more valuable than we think since accessibility not only facilitates everyday life but has a positive impact in economy as well as in society.
The behavior and the decisions made by the people during their mobility, are mainly affected by the four following criteria: cost and time of the mobility, concepts that are interdependent to one another since time affects cost, while also safety and convenience.
In order to find the most efficient combination of the 4 aforementioned criteria, it is crucial we map the transported people’s habits, aspects and intentions. For instance, how do they select a journey to follow and with which of the criteria do they choose a means of transport among the available ones are issues that concerned transportation engineers. That is the reason why in transportation planning the “Behavioral Modelling” is implemented. The “Behavioral Modelling” is based on the analysis and modelling of data which derive from the sentimental conduct of people examined. However, despite the relative technical ease of the method, problematic issues arise during its implementation – and in fact unsolvable ones.
Initially, the human behavior of those travelling is unpredictable, which results in just a simple estimation of the demand or any action of the user of a road section or intersection. This dramatically increases the uncertainty introduced into the model, since if the estimate turns out to be a ‘bad’ one, the ‘cost’ of a wrong design decision is reflected on one or more of the four criteria. In addition, sometimes it proves difficult to access data, as it is considered necessary to ensure the protection of personal data, such as those received from social media or the Bluetooth signal of modern vehicles.
In the attempt to deal, at least partially, with the complex problems that belong to the sphere of the travelers’ psychology, operational research comes in as a reliable helper. In general, that means the questionnaires available either in physical form or on the street, or online and which aim to psychoanalyze travelers. In order to properly conduct operational research, knowledge from the psychology field is well needed and utilized. The main intention in this seemingly simple process, is to achieve a paradoxical balance. On the one hand, the questions should be kept short and easy to understand, so that the respondents do not feel pressured or that they are procrastinating on something pointless. On the other hand, the questions posed to the users must be constructed in such a way, that the decisions to be made as a result of the processing of the collected data will ensure the best possible operation of the network or intersection.
Given the above analysis, during transportation planning, the urban planner ends up with an optimal, depending on the conditions but never an absolute, solution. Roads, as well as the science that studies them, are as complex as the psyche of the people who use them. People’s behavior affects the functioning of the network, while at the same time the network itself affects the feelings and attitudes of its users towards it. Sometimes, this two-way relationship that is teeming with life, is positive and sometimes negative. Sometimes it spreads joy, meetings, opportunities and sometimes pain or death. All we can say for sure is that this relationship will never disappear, because through it we literally travel, move forward and therefore hope.
