ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief summary of METPEX before addressing the relationship between Smart Cities and transport and the input METPEX has contributed to the debate.
Summary of the METPEX project This book has emerged from the METPEX project. The project arose out of the need to increase sustainable transport and reduce carbon emissions in urban areas. It is accepted that one way of achieving this is by increasing the number of users of public (and active) transport. A necessary initial step in shifting perceptions of public transport is to understand why travellers view public transport poorly. A first step in understanding the perceptions of all potential travellers is to create a set of inclusive, reliable and validated measurement instruments to measure the quality of ’real’ journeys (from origin to destination, encompassing all parts of the journey, walking, transfer and multimodal components). The two central arguments of METPEX were that: 1) travellers would only be attracted to public/active forms of transport if they are perceived to be of high quality; 2) that a holistic approach should be adopted to both the whole journey experience and to accommodating the needs of the full range of users.
