Knowledge of the Concept Light Rail Transit: Determinants of the Cognitive Mismatch between Actual and Perceived Knowledge

The Flemish public transport company “De Lijn” is planning the development of a new Light Rail network for medium range distance trips (10 to 40km). A challenge exists in the fact that the concept of Light Rail Transit (LRT) is relatively unknown in Flanders. Therefore this paper explores the knowledge of the concept ‘Light Rail Transit’ among the Flemish population. To investigate the knowledge, two separate binary logit models are estimated to explore the determinants of the overall actual knowledge and the determinants of a cognitive mismatch. The results show that age, sex, public transit use, household size, bicycle ownership and weekly number of shopping activities contribute significantly to the overall actual knowledge of the LRT-concept. Besides, cognitive mismatch is only significantly affected by age and gender. Moreover, the results reveal a serious lack of knowledge of the concept of LRT. Consequently, a successful implementation of the LRT-system in Flanders may be jeopardized and thus it is of crucial importance to raise the level of knowledge. A first option is knowledge acquisition based on experience of the transit network. In this view, it can be a good idea to develop “travel-one-day-for-free” marketing actions. Second, it is important to provide information to the travelers by contriving information campaigns based on the determinants identified by the models. How the campaigns should be constructed from an intrinsic and psychological point of view and deliberating between the methods of communication to reach the various target groups are some important considerations for further research.