The picturesque Arrábida Monastery near Setúbal (Portugal) hosted the MoTiV futures assessment workshop “Future Trends and Hypotheses on the Value of Travel Time (VTT)” on 17-18 January 2018. Organised by the project partner TIS (Consultores em Transportes Inovação e Sistemas, S.A.), the workshop was facilitated by the Portuguese futurist Hugo Garcia and gathered 23 invited experts and business leaders from various sectors like transport, marketing, data protection, ITS, as well as the MoTiV consortium members. The aim was to further explore the potential impacts of megatrends on VTT and to identify underlying hypotheses and solution ideas about the factors that may influence travel time valuation.
To this end, participants, divided into working groups, were involved in two creative activities: the creation of a ‘’futures wheel’’ of insights based on each considered megatrend and the creation of real life personas and solutions for each persona’s needs. Aging society, constant connectivity, environment (as a problem), individualism & horizontalism, empowerwoment (taking into account factors that are felt differently by women) were among the 12 identified megatrends. More than predicting what the future would be, this exercise was rather trying to dig in into what might be happening in the present.
From the results of the futures wheel and persona analyses, a number of hypotheses on the causes and consequences of VTT evolution have been generated and used as an input for the development of the MoTiV conceptual framework. They will be further validated through the data collection. After the workshop, based on the outcomes, four possible future scenarios on transport use and VTT have been created.
An interesting result from the futures wheel analysis is that few hypotheses related to time and cost dimensions were raised. Whether this is a bias of the exercise or the symptom of a trend will be confirmed by the data collection and analysis.
The workshop raised interest on Portuguese media.
The outcomes of the workshop were illustrated by Dr. Lugano at the Opening ERAdiate Lecture Series and are presented in the public report ‘’D2.1 Outlook on Value of Travel Time: Futures Study and Related Hypotheses’’, available on the MoTiV website.
For further information about MoTiV, please visit the project website: www.motivproject.eu
Dr. Giuseppe Lugano, ERAdiate Team member, H2020 MoTiV