Office Location Choice Behaviour and Intelligent Transport Systems

This dissertation presents research on how intelligent transport systems (ITS) might influence the location preferences of offices in urbanized regions. Studies on ITS in relation to location development are scarce and limited in scope. The author first focuses on the specification of ITS-related transport concepts made operational as attributes that potentially improve the accessibility of office locations, noting that offices relate closely to the mobility of people, in the form of employees or clients in city areas. The author creates and validates models from a preference study of ITS related transport concepts, specifically the automatic car lane, the automatic bus lane, and the People Mover from park-and-ride locations. The study results show, as expected, that the perception of accessibility of an office re-location is important to the decisionmaking process and is based primarily on conventional transportation concepts. The three specified ITS-related transport concepts were also found ton contribute significantly to the accessibility of the location preference model. The automatic bus lane contributes the most to the preference model. The author concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of these data to discussions of developing new transportation options in urban areas.