ITS Monday: Edition 27, 2025

A multi-task Transformer with mixture-of-experts for personalised periodic predictions of individual travel behaviour in multimodal public transport

First-up this week, a new academic paper, with a long title and a large cast of co-authors – Haoning Xi, Zhiqi Shao, David Hensher, John Nelson, Huaming Chen, and Kasun Wijayaratna. The abstract:

Integrated multimodal public transport (PT) systems are reshaping urban mobility by providing personalised travel experiences tailored to individual users. A critical challenge in realising personalised mobility is predicting users’ periodic travel behaviors to capture each user’s evolving travel preferences and patterns.

Big data and AI have opened new opportunities to accurately predict individual travel behaviour, which is a critical initial step toward effective planning of personalised mobility bundle subscriptions and improvement of mobility services. This study proposes a novel framework, PTBformer-MMoE, for personalised periodic prediction of individual travel behaviour, specifically predicting each user’s monthly mode-specific travel frequency class (classification tasks) and each user’s monthly expected travel fare (regression task), using the user’s most recent travel records. Within the multi-gate mixture-of-experts (MMoE) framework, each expert network is realised by a PTBformer, and each gate determines the weighted contributions of expert outputs relevant to a specific task tower.

The PTBformer integrates two key modules, i.e., a Multi-mode Transformer employing multi-feature self-attention for continuous time-series travel data; and an OD Transformer capturing OD-specific travel features with multi-OD self-attention. Evaluated on a multimodal (bus, rail, ferry, and tram) dataset with over 0.96 billion travel records of 1.58 million users in Queensland, Australia, during 01/202101/2023, the proposed PTBformer-MMoE demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in predicting each user’s monthly mode-specific travel frequency class and monthly expected travel fare compared to 9 baseline models, setting a new benchmark for individual travel behaviour predictions.

The predictive capabilities of PTBformer-MMoE demonstrate its significant potential for real-world applications such as personalised mobility subscriptions, targeted recommendations, and optimized demand management, ultimately paving the way toward data-driven and user-centric multimodal PT systems.

The impact of ride experience on car travelers’ adoption of private and shared autonomous vehicles

Another new academic paper, with the prolific David Hensher again being listed as a co-author, along with Haoyang Mao, Hao Li, Zhicheng Jin, and Huizhao Tu. The abstract:

The proliferation of autonomous vehicle (AV) pilot projects provides travelers with ride experiences that might have potential influences on AV adoption. This study, in particular, investigates the impacts of ride experiences on car travelers’ (CTs) choices on AVs. Face-to-face surveys near the shared autonomous vehicle (SAV) stations are conducted to collect data on CTs in two situations: CTs possessing private conventional vehicle (PCV) and those not possessing PCV. An Integrated Choice and Latent Variable (ICLV) model is adopted to integrate ride experience, latent psychological variables, and mode choice behaviours to investigate sources of influence on CTs’ choices of AVs.

The results indicate that ride experience exerts a stronger positive influence on AV adoption, compared to socio-demographic attributes such as age, gender, and income. According to marginal effect estimates, ride experience can increase the likelihood of AV adoption by 7.37%. However, at the current stage, the purchase cost of private autonomous vehicles (PAVs) remains a decisive factor for CTs. When they do not possess a PCV, and the purchase costs of PAVs and PCVs are equal, their preference shifts in favor of PAVs. We suggest that the government and AV companies persist in promoting AV pilot projects and utilize various social media channels to raise positive awareness about AVs.

Related iMOVE articles:

• Autonomous Driving Info, Projects & Resources
• Autonomous Driving Technology: Info, Projects & Resources

Related iMOVE projects:

• CAVs and Australians: Attitudes, perceptions, preferences
• Environmental impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles
• Safely deploying automated vehicles on Australian roads

Police crack down on e-bikes as crashes, injuries spike

It’s been a big news week in the area of e-mobility, and here is the first of a couple of stories on the topic. “Victoria Police are ramping up efforts to tackle the growing issue of illegal and overpowered e-bikes on Melbourne’s roads, as the number of crashes involving e-bikes continues to climb. The new initiative, Operation Consider, launched on Wednesday and involves police patrols on foot, by bike, motorcycle, and highway patrol vehicles to enforce e-bike compliance in the CBD.”

Related iMOVE article:

• Micromobility: Info, Projects & Resources

People with e-bikes losing access to public transport

A 3CR podcast, with Elliot Fishman of the Institute for Sensible Transport discussing the Victorian State Government’s proposed ban on people travelling with e-bikes on trains.

Related iMOVE article:

• Liar, liar, e-Bikes on fire

Related iMOVE project:

• Fire safety for EVs and micromobility: Best practice assessment

Queensland’s 50 cent fares deliver savings and patronage increase

“The Queensland government has provided an update on its permanent 50 cent fare measure for public transport in the state. With more than 96 million trips having been taken on public transport since the state government made 50 cent fares permanent, the cost of living measure has saved Queenslanders almost $200 million.”

Related iMOVE project:

• Implications of large-scale price reductions in public transport fares

Experts’ perspectives on shared responsibility for speed management: A thematic analysis informed by systems thinking

Another new academic paper, co-authored by Maria Eugenia Keller, Barry Watson, Sherrie-Anne Kaye, Mark King, and Ioni Lewis. The abstract:

Sharing responsibility for road safety is a key principle of the Safe System Approach, but little practical guidance has been provided on its implementation. This article utilises a systems thinking lens to explore how the concept of shared responsibility for speed management is understood and operationalised. The study was informed by thirty-three semi-structured interviews with road safety experts and practitioners from varied backgrounds, mostly from Sweden and Australia. A reflexive thematic analysis exploring perceptions around the concept of shared responsibility for speed management and associated emerging challenges was conducted, from which four themes were generated.

The first of these themes suggested that responsibility in this context can be understood as being anchored in legal frameworks, in moral imperatives or as related to crash causality factors. The second theme gathered shared patterns of meaning around competing mindsets with very different explanations into how road safety results are delivered, with implications for effectively sharing responsibility for speed management. Theme three suggested that sharing responsibility for speed management can be enhanced by stakeholders’ goal alignment. Finally, the fourth theme suggested the need to modify the speed management’s governance framework, including reassessing the roles, responsibilities and accountability of stakeholders as well as the transparency of policy processes.

This study suggests challenges may arise in some contexts in operationalising the concept of shared responsibility for speed management. Practical implications include developing practitioner guidelines providing conceptual clarity and tools to improve speed management governance and responsibility design, tying performance metrics to individual and collective responsibilities and enhancing transparency.

Related iMOVE project:

• Method to monitor the share of safe travel on high-speed roads

Moments of Change: How to enhance the effectiveness of behavioural interventions in travel

The link here goes directly to a download the new publication from the UK Department of Transport. “This report draws together existing theory on how behaviour is affected by moments of change in people’s lives. It provides a framework for practitioners who are designing and implementing interventions intended to promote sustainable travel behaviours.

Moments of change are periods of flux when people are more likely than at other times to change their behaviours. In the context of travel, such moments include when people move home or when they become aware of the opening of a new travel facility. At such times, people are more likely to change the frequency with which they travel, how they travel, when they travel and to where they travel.

Related iMOVE projects:

• Encouraging travel behaviour change during network disruption
• Behavioural change for sustainable transport

BIC calls for national consistency in harmonised ZEB specification response

“Following its recent industry-wide survey, BIC has responded to the National ZEB Harmonisation Working Group’s consultation on a proposed nationally consistent set of minimum requirements for ZEBs. The survey covered 19 key high level areas, from vehicle range to door standards.”

Related iMOVE article:

• Electric Vehicles: Info, Projects & Resources

Related iMOVE project:

• Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System sound design