Immersive Technologies As a Tool For Evaluating Sustainable Mobility Policy Effectiveness

Transportation planning is about coming up with and looking at different policies, programs, and projects that affect how people and goods get around in a certain area. In this field, technicians rely on quantitative methods and modeling tools to carefully examine the effects and the real usefulness of the measures proposed to improve the transportation system. To do this, mobility surveys are often used to evaluate the level of acceptance/preference of users for new transport services or improvement of existing ones (e.g., redevelopment of a transport terminal; new bus connections/stops; new services for travelers). Often in these surveys, hypothetical scenarios of services/facilities that do not yet exist are submitted to users through the so-called Stated-Preferences (SP) surveys. Although there is a copious literature on this type of survey and on the models and methods that can be derived from this data, little attention has yet been paid to the quality with which the hypothetical scenarios are presented to travelers (e.g. images, videos or simple text description) and above all to their real ability to identify themselves with these hypothetical contexts (e.g. the choice between a new and non-existing train service competing with the usual bus service used every day). This issue is central for mobility planners, because a low capacity of users’ identification corresponds to a low quality of the models and estimates that derive from them, and which can limit/undermine the entire planning process. The recent disruptive development of immersive technologies (es, virtual reality; augmented reality), developed mainly for other sectors (e.g., gaming and entertainment; education and training; retail and e-commerce; architectural design and visualization) today also find a possible application in the transport sector as a usufull tool for evaluating mobility policy effectiveness within, for example, SP survey. This paper aims to look at the main immersive technologies, like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), and see how they are used in transportation planning. It also tries to point out what works well and what doesn’t for each technology. The results show that extended reality technologies (VR, AR, MR) make transport SP surveys feel more realistic and help users relate better to the scenarios, which in turn makes transport models more reliable. VR gives a fully immersive experience but can be expensive and tricky to use, while AR and MR offer a mix of realism and easier access. We also need standard methods and long-term studies to really understand how these technologies affect planning decisions.