Bridging the divide : design’s role in improving multi-modal transport

![CDATA[For a public transport user to experience an efficient journey, the transport system should demonstrate the network effect (Mees 2000; Nielsen et al. 2005); combining available modes in a network to achieve their best capacity. The transport planning process exhibits an excellent opportunity to foster the network effect, displaying refined intelligent use of the available statistical information. However, there are limitations in the reach of planning alone. Statistical information is prone to disregard some finer points of transport operation; by viewing the world through a quantitative lens we can lose focus on users overlooked by our correlations and percentiles. Incorporating issues outside the scope of statistical analysis leads to an informal design process within planning. These issues are generally unnamed in the literature; Vuchic (2005) alludes to the existence of “minor factors”, parallel to potential travel demand that contribute to influencing transit travel. Usability is a significant contributor to the success of any product, including successful public transport. Physical, psychological and social barriers are evident in transport implementation (Bendixson 1974), and are difficult to predict and combat through planning with only quantitative data. In practice, the qualitative factors are analysed using a descriptive process; one role of design is to provide a proven framework for such a process. The design process offers planners a means to identify and resolve a range of problems from a variety of viewpoints, beyond the constraints of traditional planning and its immediate theoretical boundaries. Following the design process in the planning stage, design will also contribute in the physical sense, as a product. Often dismissed as purely aesthetic, design content embodies information and solutions from disparate fields, whilst in contemporary ergonomic literature aesthetics is recognised as being integral to usability (Norman 2004). The product of design could be implemented as a partner to the planning outcomes, or as the embodiment of a specific solution. The authors recognise the informal existence of design in the planning process, the intention being to formalise and expand on its possible contribution with a focus on user-centric issues. Key to this exploration is the suitability of different stages in the design process to deal with multi-modal transport problems of differing maturity; pre-planning to post-implementation.]]