Multitasking on the go: an observation study on the Brussels public transport

Vrije Universiteit Brussel
2016
Tan Dat
Ton
Nowadays, performing multitasking activities on the move has become more and more popular. Such propensity has increasingly attracted lots of attentions from scholars. In this streamline, the thesis is to explore how multitasking activities are performed in different modes of public transport (PT) in Brussels city, and whether they are affected by the demographics, distance and level of crowdedness factors. In addition, it looks into the way and how PT passengers interact with their information and communication technology (ICT) devices. Structured observation is used to conduct the survey of 1216 PT passengers (on bus, tram and metro) in May 2016. The result shows, on the one hand, that the length of the journey and demographics have significant impact on passengers’ decision to multitask. On the other hand, it proves that the frequency of using ICTs not only being influenced by demographics, but its relationship with the transport types is also moderated by crowdedness level. On top of that, a comparison with a previous study which adopted a different methodology but in the same context is conducted both to confirm the reliability and validity of this paper and to give an insight about Brussels public transport and its users’ multitasking tendency.
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