Risk Perception and Well-Being in Public Transport after the Pandemic: An Intervention

Abstract

The COVID-19-pandemic increased concerns of using public transportation and impaired public transport passengers’ travel well-being. This study seeks to use targeted communication to reduce the risk perception of passengers of public buses and thereby improve the subjective well-being of public transport passengers in the aftermarth of the pandemic. A pre-registered quasi experimental field-study in two bus line bundles was conducted. The intervention consisted of visualizing the ventilation in the bus in order to provoke risk related belief change. The intervention successfully increased passengers’ awareness of fresh air supply in the bus in the intervention group as compared to the control group (d = 0.25). However, this awareness did neither reduce passengers’ risk perception in public transport, nor did it increase their subjective well-being in the bus. An explorative analyses contributed to the literature by identifying the most critical determinants of risk perception and subjective well-being on-board of a public bus.

Note:
Registration Details: The study was preregistered on OSF: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4KNVP.

Funding Information: This survey is a part of the research project “Entwicklung eines pandemieresistenten ÖPNV (EMILIA)” [Development of a Pandemic Resistant Public Transport]. It is funded by Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr (BMDV) [Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport] for three years with 1.26 million euros [grant number: ÖPNV.001/001#007 - 2021].

Declaration of Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval Statement: Written informed consent from each participant was obtained in the beginning of the study. Ethical review and approval were not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements

Keywords: risk perception, public transportation, intervention, pandemic, experimental field study, subjective well-being