Multitasking Activities

Back to the raised questions within the realm of interest of this research, there are some crucial conclusions which can be drawn from the analysis result. To the context of the observation, together with “doing nothing and/or gazing out of window”, the other three most popular observed multitasking activities are “talking with other passengers”, “messaging” and “listening to music/radio”. Regardless of mode, all of them combined together take up three fourths the total number of multitasking activities in vehicles. The analysis shows that the length of the journey has significant influence to the way people behave. The longer the distance is (or the more stops a passenger travels), the more likely he or she would engage to an activity other

Keseru et al. (2015) reports that women are likely to participate on conversation than men. This tendency is re-affirmed again in our report in which men less engage on “talking with other passengers” than women. At the first sight, it seems correct because it reflects the acceptably widespread stereotype with little question that women tend to talk more than men. However, several researches prove the opposite. Hence, the curious question here is how to interpreter the above result correctly? It depends on the “context and structure of social interaction”, James and Drakich (1993, p.281) argue. According to their study, men and women are generally have their own goals in socialization, males frequently tend to talk in the formal setting requiring more formal interaction (p.299), whereas the situation that females are found to talk more often takes place in the informal context where they tend to keep the conversation more smoothly and “show goodwill towards others” (p.302). “Women are also expected to talk more about personal feelings and other socio-emotional matters relevant to interpersonal relationships to a greater extent than do men” (p.302). The above perception might be considered help explain the common findings in both this thesis and previous study conducted by Keseru et al. (2015), where public transport environment will absolutely be the social setting, not simply a formal stage where men can show

Male passengers and who are at young age are more frequently use ICTs than female and elderly ones respectively. On the other hand, the frequency itself and its relationship with type of transport is moderated by the in-vehicle crowdedness level. On average, around 35% total activities is ICTs related. However, it is more on bus (just over 40%) than tram and metro (around 32%). We can conclude that ICTs have a significant involvement among PT passengers’ multitasking activities. This finding challenges the opposite claim from Vilhelmson et al. (2011) that “mobile ICT use is still rather low in terms of frequency of use by all travelers, it should still be regarded as offering considerable potential for growth”. In addition, the observation and its regression results also suggest that the mode of transport does not significantly affect the choice of multitasks, nevertheless it indeed influences the way passengers interact with their ICT devices. For instance, people travel by metro are more frequently using ICT devices than by tram or