Who Uses a Mobility Card? A Case Study on the WienMobil Card

Cheap, fast, comfortable and environmental-friendly – people travelling inter- or multimodal can utilize the advantages of different transport modes by selecting or combining those which best meet their specific requirements in terms of trip purposes or travel patterns. However, there are barriers to inter- or multimodal travel behaviour. Mobility cards such as the WienMobil card might be the solution to break some of them. They enable to use several mobility services and modes of transport. The WienMobil card was introduced in spring 2015 and combines an annual PT ticket and access to both – a bike- and carsharing scheme. Additionally cardholders can use it to pay for taxi rides as well as get discounts for certain services like using the airport express train, for charging electric vehicles and for using urban car park facilities. The impacts of the WienMobil card are currently analysed in the project Guide2Wear using a pre-post-control-group approach. It includes a Web survey and two GPS-tracking periods, each covering an entire week. This article describes the first users of the WienMobil card, the so-called lead users with regard to socio-demographics, their mobility behaviour as well as their mobility-related expectations and requirements. The control group consists of annual PT ticket owners. The lead users are younger, more often male and have an above-average education level. Their mobility behaviour can be marked as more multimodal already before they used the WienMobil card. However, differences are even more pronounced in terms of perceived and real mobility behaviour. Considering attitudes towards public transport, there are no clear group differences.