The social context of urban travel behaviour

The blueprint for achieving a modal shift from car use to public transport and active transport has remained an elusive part of the endeavour towards more sustainable urban transport. This could partly be due to a lack of extensive research into the factors that influence people to use certain modes of transport, but rarely or never use other modes. Until now most research into travel behaviour has been based on economic rationalism and other quantitative studies, which limits the factors that can be considered. To address this gap a framework has been developed to scope the various influences related to transport that people are exposed to in society, referred to as ‘social influences’.This thesis examines how social influences encourage or discourage the use of different modes of transport. This is done by firstly examining the issues, processes and perspectives that currently frame the way transport is considered. It then considers how people are exposed to social influences related to urban transport. This involves researching the determinants of behaviour found in psychological and sociological literature along with developing an understanding of the characteristics of travel behaviour that may affect the perceived importance of different determinants of behaviour. In order to understand how social influences affect these determinants of behaviour, the thesis investigates the way messages are developed, portrayed and interpreted. By combining an understanding of the influence of messages, with the influence of other determinants of behaviour, a framework, which consists of causal links between transport-related messages and travel behaviour, is developed.This framework is then applied to prominent ways people receive transport-related messages. This includes a focused study of messages within mass media. The development and application of this framework leads to a number of recommendations to assist the design of future policy options for encouraging a greater use of sustainable transport modes, namely public transport and active transport. These include taking into account the way messages portray images of transport use; the prevalence of transport use; the proximity of people to the use of different modes of transport; the framing of transport problems, solutions and responsibility; the portrayal of a sense of fairness and power; and the way messages lead to competency to deal with the complexity and variability of transport. The potential for existing strategies to address these issues is examined, where existing strategies come from sustainable transport or other public health campaigns such as anti-smoking. The work in this thesis is complementary to the development of infrastructure and services for active transport and public transport. By addressing social influences, it is expected there will be improvements to the support and use of such infrastructure and services