Are You a Surveyor or a Daydreamer? Developing a Behavioral Typology of Railway Users

Abstract

This article summarizes the results of a research carried out by Jean-Marie Floch at the end of the 1980s as part of a consultancy commissioned by the Paris metropolitan region's transit authority (RATP), which wanted to better understand the profiles of users of the metro and suburban train network in order to improve its service offer. After an extensive investigation into the multiple ways of using public transport - always thinking of the traveler's journey as a text to be analyzed - Floch establishes four major interdefined categories of metro passengers: surveyors, professionals, daydreamers and strollers, each with their own modes of locomotion, their degree of mastery of the spaces traversed, their greater or lesser sensitivity to the surroundings, their
perception of the presence and behavior of other passengers and of the metro workers. In this work, the author anticipates some of the points that semioticians would later develop, such as the semiotic theorization of forms of life or the question of meaning-producing practices within social life.