Playing with Traffic: An Emerging Methodology for Developing Gamified Mobility Applications

Introduction

Growing traffic and the various problems it creates are currently a cause for concern in many countries and new approaches are being developed in order to address these issues. Existing methods include centralised approaches, decentralised approaches and the (re-) designation or creation of infrastructures. Centralised approaches comprise of electronic monitoring and advisory systems, that collect sensor data with static infrastructure on major roads and process it in a traffic control center from which the corrections are displayed on the network using digital roadside signs. The downside of these approaches is the cost of the technology. Decentralised approaches, such as vehicular or mobile ad-hoc networks (VANET/ MANET), are less costly since they allow mobility participants to be notified about instances on the road ahead without having to send the data to a control center. However, their use is still very limited due to different standards and transmission delays (Bronzi, Frank & Castignani 2014). Other approaches include (re-) designating infrastructure, such as creating priority lanes for shared vehicles in Seattle (USA) or cycle lanes instead of roads in Tübingen (Germany). Yet the unique character of every commute is not taken into account and although daily commutes might look very similar, they usually involve complex motivations and decisions.

We take a novel approach that takes into account various existing mobility behaviours. The I-GEAR project (Incentives and Gaming Environment for Automotive Routing) (McCall, Kracheel, & Koenig, 2012a; McCall & Koenig, 2012c) explores how to change mobility behaviour through gamified mobile applications in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is an interesting case for a mobility behaviour study because on average 226 k commuters travel every day to this relatively small (2586 km²) country. The majority of them are cross-border commuters from the Greater Region; from France (108 k), Belgium (61 k) and Germany (57 k). Almost half of them head to Luxembourg City (Figure 1). Luxembourg City is the capital and with 107.2 k inhabitants the biggest city. However, a commuter inbound of around 75% of the total of the city’ inhabitants generates substantial challenges for the road infrastructure and the traffic management. Another, self-inflicted problem is the high rate of vehicle ownership with around 431 k motor vehicles registered in Luxembourg compared to an overall population of only 549.7 k inhabitants (STATEC, 2014).

Figure 1.

Daily cross-border commutes to Luxembourg

(Schmitz, 2012, p. 21)