Inland Traffic by the Inland Sea

Weekend craze in Parndorf

Saturday morning in Burgenland: the car parks of the outlets in Parndorf fill up, cyclists head for Lake Neusiedl, and in Eisenstadt the weekly shopping is done. At the same time, the bus timetable shrinks to a third of its weekday service. Demand is high precisely when public transport supply is lowest.

How big is this gap, where does it open up, and where could a small incentive make the difference between car and bus or bike? We have explored these questions with mobile phone data for the whole of Burgenland.

On a Saturday, Burgenland's residents still make about 737,000 trips within the region, on a Sunday 560,000. The bus service, however, falls to 31 % (Saturday) and 21 % (Sunday) of its weekday departures. Only the railway keeps an almost constant timetable.

The consequence is visible in the model: on a weekday, 46 % of all trips have a usable public transport connection, on Saturday 34 %, on Sunday only 26 %. The public transport share falls from 8.4 % to 5.4 % and 4.0 % – with identical model parameters.

Trips within Burgenland. Car = driver and passenger. The survey row leaves out 0.5 % other modes.

Outlet location Parndorf

Saturday is shopping day: 12,800 trips lead to the outlet zone with both outlets, compared with 8,900 on a weekday – 10,100 of them by car. 3,200 of these car trips start within cycling distance and 1,900 in areas with a usable public transport connection, for example along the railway from Neusiedl am See. From Kittsee in the north-east, on the other hand, there is no direct connection on Saturdays. On Sundays the shops are closed and the outlet bus does not run.

Eisenstadt

The provincial capital is the weekday destination: 23,200 trips per weekday, of which 5,800 car trips come from the public transport incentive area – mostly commuters. At the weekend, the PT potential shrinks to 2,400 (Saturday) and 1,300 (Sunday), while the bike potential in the immediate surroundings remains almost the same at around 5,000–6,000 car trips.

Podersdorf am See

Podersdorf can only be reached by bus. Around 2,800 trips per day lead to the village and its lakeside beach on weekdays and Saturdays, 1,900 on Sundays. The public transport potential is small, the bike potential large: around 800 car trips per day start within 5 km. Caution: the model uses the November timetable – the seasonal summer buses and the summer tourism peak are not included.

Rail plus first and last mile

Yet this is exactly where the potential lies. On Saturday, around 4,900 of the 10,100 car trips to the outlet location start in zones at most 3 km from a station with a direct train to Parndorf – from Bruckneudorf and Gattendorf via Neusiedl am See and Gols to Nickelsdorf. That is considerably more than in the PT incentive area on the map, because here the way to the station by bike counts. A further 3,200 start within cycling distance. It will not be easy: by car, these trips are on average 14.5 km and just under 12 minutes long. A chain of bike, train and B10 has to compete with that – the incentive has to make up the difference.

An incentive scheme in three building blocks

• Ticket for voucher: anyone arriving with a valid train or bus ticket gets the fare back as a shopping voucher – €5 per visit in our example calculation.
• Connection at the station: align the B10 with train arrivals at Parndorf Ort and run it more often on Saturdays, plus rental bikes or an on-demand bus for the 1.5 km between the station and the outlets. In the origin municipalities, secure bike parking at the station helps (bike & ride).
• Bike bonus in the neighbourhood: a €1.50 voucher for everyone cycling in from Parndorf, Neudorf and neighbouring villages, plus covered bike parking at the entrances.

The incentive is delivered via the Connectivity Platform – targeted at people whose trip starts in an incentive area, i.e. only where a real alternative exists.

What does it cost, what does it bring?

An example calculation for one Saturday with deliberately simple assumptions: 10 % of the rail and bike potential switch, 1.4 people per car, €5 per rail visit, €1.50 per bike visit, 150 g CO₂ per car kilometre.

Whether this pays off for the outlets depends above all on the car park: at 2.5 cars per parking space per Saturday, 580 cars correspond to around 230 parking spaces at peak – the budget thus amounts to around €650 per parking space per year. If an additional parking space, a parking guidance system or the tailback onto the A4 costs more, the incentive also makes business sense. Two further points speak in its favour: the voucher is only redeemed when shopping, and visitors from Vienna and Bratislava – not included in this model – significantly increase the potential along the railway.

What could a local business do with this? Let's imagine a bakery chain with ten stores, distributed across Burgenland according to population – from Kittsee in the north to Jennersdorf in the south. The chain spends €1,000 per week on mobility incentives for its customers: a bike voucher for €1.50 or a bus ticket for €3. The budget is distributed according to how many car trips to each store come from a bike or public transport incentive area.

The data suggest a clear weekly rhythm:

• Weekdays: bus tickets for commuters. €158 per day, 37 % of it for bus tickets – around 67 bike vouchers and 19 bus tickets per day.
• Saturday: bike vouchers in the neighbourhood. €118, only 23 % for public transport – around 61 bike vouchers and 9 bus tickets.
• Sunday: almost only bike. €90, of which 17 % for public transport – the bus barely runs.

The stores in Eisenstadt (€226 per week), Mattersburg (€150) and Neusiedl am See (€130) receive the most, Kittsee the least (€46).

Nudging via the Connectivity Platform

This is where the Catchment Connectivity Platform comes in: it provides the catchment and incentive areas of a destination to cooperating mobility apps, which can offer the right incentive at the right time – the free bus ticket from the outlet on Saturday afternoon, the bike voucher for the Sunday bread roll. The budget follows the data: where and when an alternative to the car actually exists.

A word of caution: the incentive areas show the potential of all car trips to a place, not the customers of a particular business. They mark where an incentive is worthwhile – how many people actually switch can only be shown by a real-world test.

In the research project MultiMoFusion, Catchment works with TU Wien, TU Graz, Invenium and Wien 3420 on merging floating phone data (FPD) with smartphone tracking – with aspern Seestadt as the urban real-world laboratory. Our project partner Invenium also provided an origin-destination matrix for Burgenland. This gave us the opportunity to test the approach in a rural region: can anonymised mobile phone data be turned into traffic volumes, catchment areas and specific nudging measures for the Catchment Connectivity Platform?

A full description of how the demand data were prepared will follow in the next blog post.