Effects of Focus Groups' results on a Travel Behavior Survey design

Transport creates an integral part of people's lives and significantly affects the quality of life and the environment in cities. Because of the increasing number of cars in cities, it is not sufficient to focus just on an improvement of traffic control algorithms or other intelligent transportation systems and solutions. It is necessary to significantly decrease the number of cars in cities, i.e. to decrease the demand for travel using personal vehicles. In order to do that, researchers try to understand the process of how travel choices are made and to learn about the potential of travel mode change. A lot of research exists in this field. A common approach adopted also in the presented work uses discrete choice experiments as a mean to learn about travel behavior. Scientific results indicate that differences among different countries and cultures must be taken into consideration and research methods cannot be simply adopted without understanding the local context. For such reasons, this paper demonstrates the importance of understanding the local perceptions and their impact on the experiment design. To optimize the experiment design, three focus groups took place in Ústi and Labem Region (Czech Republic) during November 2019 with the aim to analyze local specifics and attitudes of local inhabitants towards different transport regulation measures. This case study proved the importance of pretesting experiments before performing them, the usefulness of FGs when designing the experiments and an important role of local specifics.