Understanding the 'Two Seat' Journey

This project aimed to look for ways to shift people from taking a ‘single seat journey’ to taking ‘two seat’ journeys.

Why is this important?

Shifting people into thinking differently about travel and encouraging ‘two seat’ journeys is important for reducing traffic congestion, increasing public transport usage and improving the community health of Queenslanders. This requires a shift from habitual decision-making to more real-time decision-making. For this to occur, it is important to have a strong understanding of travellers’ perceived barriers and motivators, biases, needs and expectations about their journeys.

What did we do?

For this project, an initial literature review was conducted to examine travellers’ existing barriers and motivators, and explore past approaches to encouraging increased public transport usage. Subsequently, two co-design workshops were conducted with 25 Queensland travellers. The first workshop aimed to further understand the travellers’ motivators and barriers to taking ‘two seat’ journeys, as well as develop customer journeys for different persona groups and ideate solutions for them. The second co-design workshop involved an ‘inspiration hunt’ task, whereby teams were sent to predetermined locations with a time limit and mission. The ultimate goal of this task was to collect data on customer pain points, pleasure points and inspiration points during their journeys. The findings from these workshops ultimately influenced the project’s recommendations, which were presented to the Department of Transport and Main Roads upon the project’s completion.

What did we find out?

• Customers perceived limited value in a two-seat journey
• Only some personas were listening to current messages
• Most of the barriers to the two seat journey exist during the mode transfer stage
• All major pain points in the two seat journey are about time, but exist at different stages in the customer journey
• All customers disliked interference by the transport system in achieving their goals
• Customers who perceive interference with their travel goal perceived more pain points
• While customers were given a specific transport goal, some had other goals in mind too. Those who met those extra goals reported a more pleasant journey overall.

For more information about this project, please contact: best@qut.edu.au