Handling user needs: methods for knowledge creation in Swedish transport planning

European Transport Research Review

Original Paper

Robert Hrelja¹  Hans Antonson² 

[1] Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Linköping, Olaus Magnus väg 35, 581 95, Linköping, Sweden;Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Olaus Magnus väg 35, 581 95, Linköping, Sweden;

关键词: Transport planning;    Knowledge creation;    Implicit method;    Explicit method;    User;    Customer;   

DOI  :  10.1007/s12544-012-0076-7

 received in 2011-04-14, accepted in 2012-02-07,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

Background and aimTransport planning faces new demands for a dialogue with users. Transport planners no longer just build roads; nowadays they also must listen to users, whose wishes are meant to have an impact on the design and maintenance of the road transport system. Yet how can we know what users really want? This article sets out to analyze the methods with which transport planners gather information about users and their needs; to do so, it uses a case-study of how transport planners at the National Swedish Road Authority handle these questions on a day-to-day basis.Result and discussionThe results show that the planners’ practices can be analytically understood as something that produces knowledge, representativity, and the identities and needs of the users. The planners base their analyses of user need largely on personal experience. The descriptive, interpretative, and evaluating elements in their knowledge production tend to be hidden in central policy documents and the workings of operational planning systems. If the goals with respect to user influence are to be attained, transport planning must be pursued with a greater understanding of how it conceives of its users as specific categories with particular needs and identities.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© The Author(s) 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.