Aline DELATTE
Biographical note
Ms Delatte is conducting transport social research at MENA CTE since September 2015. Her current field of interest is the analysis of urban travel behaviour in the context of changing urban and societal dynamics. Her work contributes to elaborate solution to foster sustainable urban transport development in the MENA region. Prior to joining UITP MENA CTE, Ms Delatte worked as a Researcher at the Institute for Transport Research at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and Project Manager at the Technische Universität Berlin, Department of Integrated Transport Planning. Throughout her academic career she gathered experience in partnership and fund raising for research projects. Ms Delatte has a Master degree in Civil Engineering from Ecole Spéciale des Travaux Publics (ESTP) University in Paris, France. She also holds a Master degree in Urban Management from the Technische Universität Berlin.
Presentation: What do public transport users need? Comparing perceptions from Middle-East and North-African cities
In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, transport authorities are striving to make public transport more attractive. They are aware that in order to increase public transport use, service providers must offer safe, easy, comfortable and reliable services that attract different generations and profile users. These are the key-aspects that have been identified by Van Hagen to reach an acceptable level of satisfaction and therefore, became regular customers of the services.
During the previous years, public transport shift from being seen as an urban infrastructure managed by public authorities to be a service provided for all urban dwellers with high quality. Public transport is not an industry anymore, it is more of a service. Just like any other service in the market, the quality of the service is what defines its market share and competitors such as Uber, Lyft or Careem challenging the current minimum quality standard by offering services which lead to user satisfaction, and therefore attract and retain customers. Public Transport has to reinvent itself to retain and attract customers as well by developing high-quality public transport services.
However, it has been observed that public transport is losing share in some cities of the MENA region, such as in Tehran and Casablanca between 1995 and 2012. In this cities, it seems that the main competitor is the private car (rather than the new mobility services) according to the dramatic urban motorization increase recorded during the same period (MCD MENA 2016). Several factors can explained this trend, such as demographic and economic changes and insufficient public transport development to respond to a continuously increasing transport demand in MENA cities. It have been proved that the strong social status of the private car is a dominant factor influencing raise in motorization in cities of countries in economic transition. Knowing current and future public transport users profile is the starting point of the development of a customer centric strategy. It is therefore fundamental to understand the correlation between socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the current and future public transport users (car users) and their respective travel patterns and preferences. Through a secondary analysis of the most recent mobility surveys conducted in the MENA region, some first findings could be raised and enable to identify two main groups with a specific needs and travel patterns: women and young people. A focus will be given to this two specific groups in the framework of the data collection and the analysis.
