An Exploratory Study on the Use of Collaborative Riding Based on Gamification as a Support to Public Transportation

Urban mobility is an issue that, in general, makes citizens daily life stressful and complicated. Crowd sourcing-based systems promote what is called "the power of the citizens", stimulating people to contribute on solving public and governmental problems, being mobility one of them. In our project, named Ubibus, we investigate how crowd sourcing can be applied to improve public transportation. In this paper, we propose the use of collaborative riding as a complementary alternative to public transportation, integrating private and public vehicles. We also investigate what can motivate people to participate in such a system, and how Gamification techniques can be used to improve the adherence to the system usage. In order to evaluate the subject and to understand the actual problems as regular people see it, we conducted two exploratory studies with passengers and drivers. The first one is composed by an online questionnaire, answered by Brazilian people, and the second one is a field study conducted with two groups of students at our University. This paper aims to present the performed studies and to discuss the results achieved with them, which were used as requirements to guide the design of a collaborative riding system.