aes19 International Evaluation Conference

Zarin Salter (Active Transport and Safety, Urban Mobility, Department of Transport - WA), Dr Kim Carter (Data Analysis  stralia, Pty Ltd)

Implemented by The Government of Western Australia, Your Move delivers a suite of tailored travel behaviour change (TBC) programs that provide participants with localised, personalised information, coaching conversations and ongoing feedback to encourage them to walk, ride a bike and use public transport more often for their daily trips.

In 2018, de-identified, residentially coded SmartRider ticketing data made it possible to analyse the public transport patronage habits of residents who lived in two previous Your Move project areas and statistically compare their travel with those who lived in areas of greater Perth that received no Your Move projects. The data source was representative of the whole metropolitan area and was still sufficiently large enough for analysis even after a thorough data cleaning process was applied.
The resulting figures for the two previous Your Move projects were impressive and the most reliable estimate of public transport mode shift that Your Move has been able to obtain in its 20-year history. Having robust figures for public transport mode shift made it possible to extrapolate the shift in other modes and model the overall benefits of a Your Move project to the whole community.

Traditionally, TBC programs have been evaluated using self-report data collection techniques which are expensive and prone to risks associated with data reliability, survey length and respondent burden, small sample size, inaccurate sampling between interviewers, control group selection, panel recruitment loss, and weather variability.

This presentation will discuss the need for practitioners to innovate in the TBC evaluation space, specifically with respect to data source accuracy, and will share insights learned from un-packing the box of treasures hidden within ticketing data.