Study on the Multimodal Urban Transit System Design

Commuters in dense urban ecosystems face fragmented transit systems that require multiple disjointed applications to plan, track, and pay for a single journey. This fragmentation increases cognitive load, navigation anxiety, and transfer friction, most acutely across the first- and last-mile legs where live schedule information is often missing or unreliable. This study examines mulfimodal urban transit as an end-to-end user-experience problem rather than a purely infrastructural or telemetry one, focusing on how a unified interface can lower the switching costs commuters incur when moving between metro, bus, micro-mobility, ride-hailing, and walking. The work adopts a user-centered research design incorporating user interviews, contextual inquiry, taskbased usability testing, and systemic service mapping. These methods informed the development of an integrated multimodal transit platform that unifies real-time route optimization, multi-agency ticketing, and contextual guidance across multimodal transition nodes into one continuous flow. The study demonstrates that a unified transit user experience significantly lowers the switching costs of commuters' mental models and improves commuter efficiency across complex transit networks. By consolidating dynamic journey planning, micro-mobility integration, interoperable digital ticketing, and clear posttrip management into a single interface, the proposed system reduces the friction that fragmented tools currently create for daily urban travel.