Working Paper 2: Motivations and Barriers to Adopting Sustainable Travel Behaviour

This paper investigates different travel behaviour related projects and identifies barriers and motivations for behavioural change towards more sustainable mobility. Since meth-odologies from other disciplines such as sociology and psychology are becoming more important for travel behaviour research, a main focus is on inter-disciplinary approaches. These concepts seem to constitute fruitful attempts to enrich a useful knowledge base for policy and planning measures. Additionally, results from the authors ’ previous research are used to compare drivers and constraints for environmentally friendly behaviour. In general, determinants for behavioural decisions differ between types of travel – in terms of daily and tourist travel – and between transport user groups. Socio-psychological factors like attitudes towards the environment and towards certain modes of transport or the importance of moral obligation and environmental beliefs are main influencing vari-ables for daily travel. Tourist travel decisions are more dependent on individual socio-economic situations. The resulting conflict between individual knowledge about negative sustainability related effects from air travel and conflicting individual unsustainable actions leads to a strategy of collective denial and a psychological gap, where people wait for others to act without changing their own behaviour