A survey about perceptions of mobility to inform an agent-based simulator of subjective modal choice

TL;DR

This paper surveys perceptions influencing urban mobility choices, develops a decision model incorporating biases, and uses an agent-based simulator to visualize how perceptions affect modal shift under urban planning changes.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-criteria decision model that integrates perception biases and habits, and applies it to an agent-based simulator for mobility choice analysis.

Findings

Perception biases significantly influence modal choice.

The simulator demonstrates how urban planning impacts mobility distribution.

Habits and biases alter the effectiveness of policy interventions.

Abstract

In order to adapt to the issues of climate change and public health, urban policies are trying to encourage soft mobility, but the share of the car remains significant. Beyond known constraints, we study here the impact of perception biases on individual choices. We designed a multi-criteria decision model, integrating the influence of habits and biases. We then conducted an online survey, which received 650 responses. We used these to calculate realistic mobility perception values, in order to initialise the environment and the population of a modal choice simulator, implemented in Netlogo. This allows us to visualize the adaptation of the modal distribution in reaction to the evolution of urban planning, depending on whether or not we activate biases and habits in individual reasoning. This is an extended and translated version of a demo paper published in French at JFSMA-JFMS 2024 "Un simulateur multi-agent de choix modal subjectif"