Application of Questionnaire and Instrumental Methods for Studying The Fatigue of Urban Transportation Users

Abstract

Mass transit is the main component of an urban environment to determine both the pace of its development and the living standard of population. Along with the obvious advantages of urban transportation, there are also social negative effects, among which the losses from environmental and noise pollution, traffic accidents and travel fatigue should be taken into account. Unlike the first three undesired consequences, for which evaluation methods have been developed under existing conditions, travel fatigue demonstrates a poorly studied result of the urban transportation functioning. In the spheres of material and non-material production the negative social and economic travel fatigue results can be seen as a decrease in the work productivity and quality (increased product defects), increase in the level of industrial injuries, occupational diseases, adaptation time ("working-in") to the working environment and even as a workplace aggression. In everyday life, travel fatigue can be revealed as an apathy, inactivity, absent-mindedness, bad mood, memory impairment, and a decrease in the body's resistance to various diseases. Based on the techniques of travel fatigue studying, a questionnaire method has been presented and quantitatively estimated from the reliability and validity viewpoint by mathematical statistics. Reliability and validity valuation results indicated an acceptable correlation ratio (>0.8) to consider this approach as a measure of travel fatigue expressed as a passenger’s adaptation time to workplace. The use of the "workplace adaptation time" indicator allows determining the travel fatigue regardless of the field of material or non-material production, to which passengers should be classified as employees. For the sampling volume of 80 observations, the average adaptation time is 18.2 minutes, which is statistically significant and non-random according to the t-statistics. The adaptation time value can be used to find economic losses of the travel fatigue and to select the type and number of fixed-route vehicles, traffic headways and other socially significant mass transit operation parameters which is the direction of further research. Promising aspects of the research are also improving the survey quality by increasing the sampling size and distributing the questionnaires in other cities to identify the stable trends in the passenger’s travel fatigue formation. Keywords: fatigue, questionnaire, reliability, validity, correlation coefficient, effect