Speaker
Description
Active travel, including walking and cycling for transport, supports healthy, sustainable, and equitable societies. With growing populations, climate crises, and health concerns, active travel aligns with four United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: climate change, health, sustainable cities, and sustainable transport. In car-centric nations, authorities are investing in active transport infrastructure to encourage active travel. Despite these efforts, car usage in much of the developed world remains dominant.
Active travel behavior is shaped by utilitarian, psychological, and social factors, which compete with cars' perceived advantages such as time efficiency, comfort, safety, security, and societal norms. To encourage active travel effectively, infrastructure planning and design is required to respond to the diverse travel needs and desires of individuals through infrastructure that prioritises context-specific behavioural factors aligned with individual attitudes and behaviours towards active travel.
This research examined how key behavioural drivers influence active travel across varying contexts, focusing on utilitarian factors (time, cost, distance), psychological factors (safety, comfort, security), and social factors (influence of social norms). Understanding these influential drivers helps identify active transport infrastructure attributes that best support behavioural values across different contexts.
Context including demographic and cultural characteristics as well as features of the natural and built environment, were found to affect individual active travel behaviours.
The research is conducted through a statewide survey distributed in New South Wales, Australia—a region characterised by diverse contexts such as remote low-density and highly dense urban areas with demographic diversity. The survey was distributed to 2000 participants with a representative sample split from regional and metropolitan geographical spread, gathered data on active travel patterns, attitudes, infrastructure awareness, user experiences, and preferences for infrastructure to promote uptake. The questionnaire was framed by the behavioural factors of utilitarian, psychological, and social factors that underpin active travel behaviour.
The findings highlighted relationships between contextual environments and active travel behaviour, revealing that different infrastructure solutions are effective depending on the area context. The development of a framework that integrates these contextual behaviour factors into active transport infrastructure design will facilitate place-based infrastructure strategies that optimize active travel adoption, fostering healthier, more sustainable, and equitable communities.
References
Kent, J. L., Crane, M., Waidyatillake, N., Stevenson, M., & Pearson, L. (2023) Urban form and physical activity through transport: a review based on the d-variable framework. Transport Reviews, 43 (4), pp. 726-754.
| Keywords | Active Transport; Behaviour; Infrastructure; Urban Planning |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
