Prelims

Half Title Page

AUTO MOTIVES: UNDERSTANDING CAR USE BEHAVIOURS

Title Page

AUTO MOTIVES: UNDERSTANDING CAR USE BEHAVIOURS

EDITED BY

KAREN LUCAS

University of Oxford, UK

EVELYN BLUMENBERG

University of California Los Angeles, USA

RACHEL WEINBERGER

University of Pennsylvania, USA

United Kingdom • North America • Japan

India • Malaysia • China

Copyright Page

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2011

Copyright © 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-85724-234-1

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List of Authors

Editors

Karen Lucas is a senior research fellow with the Transport Studies Unit at Oxford University. Over the past 10 years, Karen has established an international reputation for her pioneering research looking at the role of transport in social exclusion and has published extensively on this topic. Her specialist research interest is in making evident the links between the social and environmental aspects of sustainable development, with a particular focus on meeting the needs of people living in deprived and excluded communities within developed societies. In 2002/2003, she was seconded to the UK Social Exclusion Unit as a policy advisor on its study of transport and social exclusion. Karen is a book review editor for the Journal of Transport Geography and a member of its editorial board. She is an overseas representative for the US Transportation Research Board's Environmental Justice and Social and Economic Factors in Transportation Committees and a founder member of the UK Government's Sustainable Development Research Network and continues to act as a member of its Advisory Committee.

Evelyn Blumenberg is an associate professor of urban planning at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Blumenberg's research examines the effects of urban structure — the spatial location of residents, employment, and services — on economic outcomes for low-wage workers, and on the role of planning and policy in shaping the spatial structure of cities. Dr. Blumenberg has investigated the relationship between the spatial structure of urban areas and economic equality; gender issues and U.S. local economic development planning; neighbourhood economies and welfare dynamics; the travel behaviour of welfare recipients and immigrants; the transportation expenditure burden of low-income families; and interagency collaboration in the context of welfare reform.

Rachel Weinberger is an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of expertise include transportation and land-use interactions and sustainable urban transportation. Her work is particularly focused on how transportation infrastructure supply affects individual travel behaviour. Recognizing the many counterintuitive effects of transportation policy over the last hundred years, she is most interested in game-changing strategies for transportation going forward. In 2006–2007, Rachel served as the senior policy advisor on transportation to New York City Mayor Bloomberg in the development of PlaNYC, the city's much-lauded 2030 sustainability plan. Prior to joining academia, she worked as a transportation consultant for several years and for the public sector before that.

Additional Contributing Authors

Daniel G. Chatman is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the College of Environment Design at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to the travel and residential location patterns of immigrants, his current research projects address the economic impacts of transit investments, the effects of the built environment on household travel, and the future of the ‘smart growth’ planning movement.

Graham Currie holds Australia's first professorship in public transport based at the Institute of Transport Studies, Monash University, where he researches and provides training in public transport planning. He has 30 years of experience as a transit planner and is a member of several committees at the US Transportation Research Board. Professor Currie is the founder and director of an international research database on transport and social issues and is currently principal investigator for an international research project funded by the Australian Research Council examining transport disadvantage, social exclusion and well-being in metropolitan, regional and rural Victoria.

Alexa Delbosc is a research fellow in the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her primary field of research involves the social implications of public transport and transport disadvantage. She is working primarily on a collaborative Australian Research Council funded project ‘Investigating Transport Disadvantage, Social Exclusion and Well Being in Metropolitan, Regional and Rural Victoria’. Her background is in social research from her studies in social psychology at Harvard University.

Steven Farber is a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Commercial Activity (CSCA) and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. His research is focused on spatial analysis, with substantive applications to urban economic and transportation geography. Steven earned a Ph.D. degree in geography from McMaster University in 2010. Elements of his dissertation research focusing on the social costs of automobility are published in international scholarly journals and in a report identifying the links between mobility and social exclusion prepared for Human Resources and Social Development, Canada. His research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

David Gaker is a doctoral student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is focused on how people value information on the environmental impacts of their actions when they are faced with transportation decisions. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Akron, Ohio, in civil engineering and his master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, also in civil engineering.

Birgitta Gatersleben is lecturer in environmental psychology at the University of Surrey, UK. She is also course director of the modular M.Sc. programme in environmental psychology. Her work concentrates around three research areas: sustainable consumption, traffic and transport, and human experiences with nature. She has a strong interest and a wide experience in working in multidisciplinary teams to examine sustainable consumer behaviour in general and sustainable transport in particular. She has worked on a range of research projects examining transport issues, including work exploring the role of transport behaviours on social perceptions in communities, perceptions of transport-generated air pollution, and studies aiming to promote walking and cycling to work and school. Her recent work specifically examines the role of affective and social–symbolic aspects in transport decisions.

Frank Goetzke has been an assistant professor for urban economics in the School for Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, since 2006. His research focuses on transportation analysis and spatial modelling. He is especially interested in automobile ownership, public transit, non-motorized modes and traffic safety. Previously, he was an office manager for WalkBoston, one of the oldest and largest pedestrian advocacy group, a transit planner at the Central Transportation Planning Staff, which is part of the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization, a travel demand forecasting modeller for Cambridge Systematics. Dr. Goetzke has a B.A. degree in political science and biology from the University of Bremen in Germany (1991), an M.A. degree in energy and environmental studies from Boston University (1996) and a Ph.D. degree in economics from West Virginia University (2006).

Peter Jones is professor of transport and sustainable development in the Centre for Transport Studies at University College, London. He is a member of the Independent Transport Commission. He has had a long and distinguished career in travel behaviour research, and in the provision of policy advice at national and international levels. He was one of the pioneers in the development of activity-based approaches to understanding travel behaviour. In recent years he has researched extensively into the nature of accessibility problems as experienced by socially disadvantaged groups and has looked at the planning and design implications of making urban streets more sustainable. He was co-director of a recent study into UK car dependence funded by the RAC Foundation.

Nicholas Klein is a doctoral student of urban planning and public policy at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His dissertation research focuses on intercity transportation with a focus on immigrant communities. Other research projects address travel behaviour of immigrants, informal and private transit services, and participatory processes involving immigrant communities.

Antonio Páez is an associate professor in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, and affiliated with the Centre for Spatial Analysis and McMaster Institute for Transport and Logistics. His professional training is in civil engineering, with graduate degrees in information sciences and regional planning and applications from Tohoku University in Japan. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Geographical Systems, a journal dedicated to geographical analysis and theory that promotes scholarship in regional science, geography, environmental sciences, and planning.

Sandra Rosenbloom is professor of planning and adjunct professor of engineering and of natural renewable resources at the University of Arizona. She has conducted extensive research for the US government, as well as the European Union, the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, and the governments of Australia, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and UK. She is an appointed member of the Executive Committee of the US Transportation Research Board, an arm of the US National Academy of Sciences as well as a member of the Board's Strategic Policy and Planning Review sub-committee. In 2005 Dr. Rosenbloom was appointed a lifetime associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and was granted the Transportation Research Board, Roy P. Crum Award in recognition of her ground-breaking scholarship in transportation planning.

Tim Schwanen is a senior research fellow with the Transport Studies Unit at the University of Oxford. He is also a lecturer in urban geography at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Over the past decade he has worked and published widely on a variety of research topics. These include the effect of the built environment on activity/travel behaviour; the geographies of how dual-earner families juggle employment and domestic responsibilities and of the gender division of household labour; time geography and space-time accessibility analysis; travellers' coping with unreliable travel times; interactions between Internet and mobile phone use on the one hand and activity and travel patterns on the other; everyday mobility in old age and research methodologies.

Michael J. Smart is a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include the travel behaviour of immigrant communities, transportation and social equity, and access to the labour market. In particular, his research has focused on the spatial aspects of immigrant communities in the United States, and the effect of these patterns on travel. He obtained a bachelor's degree in German from Yale University and master's degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Joan L. Walker is an assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Berkeley's new Center for Global Metropolitan Studies. Her research focus is behavioural modelling, emphasizing methods and their application to urban issues including health, congestion, air quality, equity and quality of life. She is the recipient of a number of honours including the PECASE, which is the United States' highest honour for scientists.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Introduction

The idea for this edited volume emerged from a session on automobile behaviours at the 2009 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Some of its chapters are by authors who made presentations at this session. Other authors have been specifically invited to contribute in recognition of their long-standing research into a particular aspect of car-use behaviours, whilst others are relative newcomers to the field. Our list of contributors is far from exhaustive and we recognise that there are many other scholars involved in researching this subject with important things to say about it, many of whom we cite in the chapters that follow. Clearly, no book can include everyone, but it can also be difficult to identify scholars in relation to this topic. In part, because researchers working in this field come from a wide and diverse set of disciplinary backgrounds; while some are in regular dialogue with each other, others are less so and thus harder to locate.

As the title of the volume conveys, this book focuses on the factors that motivate automobile use. One of our key aims with this text has been to draw together and explain the diverse theoretical literatures that pertain to people's auto motives and to consider these theories in light of current empirical research concerning the actual automobile decisions and behaviours of varied population groups, in different locations and circumstances and at different stages of their lives. We believe it to be a unique venture in this respect, particularly in that it purposefully seeks to avoid advocacy of a single perspective or methodological approach, but rather offers a set of broader insights into ‘what drives people to drive’.

This edited volume emerges in the context of a growing trend of auto-mobility worldwide. In many ways, increased popular access to private motor vehicles can be a positive trend. As a number of chapters in this volume will demonstrate, most individuals gain huge advantages from car-based travel in terms of increased access to key economic and social activities. In most contemporary societies, travel is now an intrinsic part of the way we live our lives and a large part of the popularity of automobiles is that they allow us to decide when and where we travel and to control our micro-environments while we do so. However, travel by automobile produces numerous negative externalities. While individual benefits of automobility continue to be observed and even reaped, the environmental and social cost of this is also increasingly apparent and there is considerable worldwide concern about the negative effects of mass automobile use on the global and local environment, as well as the negative social effects of dependence on car-based transport systems.

This book takes a balanced view on these issues. Some chapters focus on the benefits of promoting increased automobile ownership and use particularly for less mobile sectors of the population; others focus on the importance of understanding auto motives in order to reduce our societal dependence on the car. In aggregate, the chapters demonstrate that the motivations for car use are both complex and varied and are usually the outcome of reciprocal interactions between ‘personal’ factors and ‘external’ circumstances.

The volume primarily is aimed at post-graduate students, researchers, policymakers and practitioners from a growing spectrum of disciplines with an interest in understanding the motivations and decision processes underpinning the public's overwhelming preference for the car as the primary means of people-based movement. Its core arguments and narratives are presented in such a way so as to offer widespread appeal to a wide-ranging audience including social and environmental scientists, human geographers, behavioural economists, transport and land-use planners, and those working in the field of urban and community development both within and outside academia. The core focus of the book is empirical research into the auto motives of populations living in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America and Australia and so it does not directly address the rapid move toward car ownership and use in the developing world. Nevertheless, many of the key motivations it identifies will be equally and sometimes more relevant in development countries and we hope that the book may help policymakers in these contexts to identify more balanced solutions to personal mobility than has so far been achieved within the developed world.

Organisation of the Book

The volume is organised in three sections:

Section 1 is designed to offer a basic framework for understanding the empirical research studies that follow. Chapter 1 by Schwanen and Lucas sets the theoretical context for the book. It identifies the four core approaches that have been developed in different disciplines to explain people's auto motives, namely accessibility and time geography, utility theory, socio-psychological theories and the new mobilities perspective. The chapter is based upon an extensive review and analysis of international literature across various academic disciplines, including transport studies, economics, human geography, psychology and sociology.

In Chapter 2, Jones builds on these various theories to offer an understanding of the nature and dynamics of car dependence. His chapter draws on the concepts and findings of a recent RAC Foundation for Motoring study, to explore the nature and meaning of ‘car dependence’, and how this becomes reinforcing over time. In particular, it seeks to explore whether car use is a matter of choice or constraint, and the conditions under which changes to driver behaviour would be feasible in order to make them more sustainable.

Chapter 3 builds on this second issue. Drawing on existing research, Weinberger and Lucas examine programs and policies that have motivated or have the potential to motivate changes in automobile behaviour.

In Sections 2 and 3 we turn to empirical research evidence to support or refute these theoretical explanations. These chapters are designed to allow the reader to explore in greater detail what motivates people to prefer their cars in practice.

Section 2 is primarily concerned with empirical analysis of the different theoretical perspectives on why people drive that are outlined in Chapter 1. First, in Chapter 4, Farber and Páez apply the principles of time-use geography to demonstrate how the spatial expansion of activity spaces over time, as a result of increased journey distances and car-based travel, has led to time budget constraints and associated reduced participation in discretionary, out-of-home activities for certain social groups.

In Chapter 5, Gaker and Walker demonstrate the use of concepts from behavioural economics, which integrates the fields of psychology and economics, to explain people's transport choices. In particular they focus on three themes within this literature: the influence of biases, the power of information and feedback, and how we are influenced by the social norms of those around us.

Goetzke and Weinberger pick up these themes in Chapter 6, to explore how people learn travel behaviour habits and preferences from their own experiences and by observing their peers. They use discrete choice analysis and random utility modelling in their analysis of two datasets. Their first study, uses the 2000 United States Census Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS) to look at data on recent movers to United States, transit rich cities and the effect of previous residential location on the decision to own automobiles. Their second study looks at the impact of peer, or social network, effects on decisions to own cars in New York City using data from the 1998/1999 New York Regional Household Travel Survey.

Chapter 7 examines the social-symbolic aspects of car use. Gatersleben draws on her own socio-psychological studies of consumer behaviour to explore the relationship between materialism and attitudes, perceptions and behaviours in relation to the car. In line with existing research on materialism, these show that people who express stronger materialistic values are more motivated to own and use a car, particularly an expensive car, and attach more value to the social symbolic aspects of their cars and are less likely to want to reduce their car use.

Section 3 of the book explores some of the empirical research that has been developed to understand the auto motives of different sectors of the car-driving populations. Schwanen's first chapter in this section focuses on the gender dimensions of car use in the everyday lives of well-educated middle-class men and women in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He uses a mixed-method approach combining literature review, in-depth interviews and a questionnaire survey to identify gender differences in access to cars, household responsibilities and employment status, as well as the norms, discourses, practices and cultures of mobility.

In Chapter 9, Rosenbloom focuses on the transportation patterns of older drivers in the United Kingdom and the United States as a way to illuminate the motives underlying older people's continued dependence on the car and their well-documented reluctance to cease driving. It concludes that, given the huge number of older drivers who may need or wish to reduce driving, governments must not only take action to keep older drivers on the road safely for as long as possible, but also substantially expand their support of a variety of public transit, community transport and volunteer driver systems, as well as more effectively integrating transportation and land use and housing policies.

Chapters 10 and 11 both focus on the car-use behaviours of low-income populations in Australia. In Chapter 11, Currie and Delbosc examine often conflicting views about what motivates car ownership and use of low-income groups in the suburbs and whether this is effectively ‘enforced’ by their housing location. Their chapter is based on a household survey covering travel, housing location, life situation, social exclusion and well-being of household in the wider Melbourne region. Lucas's chapter which follows focuses on the people living on or below the poverty line in the United Kingdom. It identifies the rapid growth in private vehicle use of low-income households over the last five years and considers whether this recent trend has emerged out of personal preference or practical necessity.

In Chapter 12, Blumenberg and Smart identify a similar strong and growing trend in the automobile use of immigrant populations in the United States. Using data from the US Census 2008 American Community Survey, the authors explore the multiple dimensions of immigrant automobile use in the United States: the factors that motivate their assimilation to automobiles, limit their use of automobiles and shape how they use automobiles.

In the final chapter of this section, Chatman and Klein expand on the themes of the previous chapter in their case study of the home and work location decisions of immigrants to the State of New Jersey. They analyse commuter mode choice data from the United States census to demonstrate how home/work location, as well as the occupations of immigrant workers, plays a role in their lower levels of auto reliance for commuting from that of the average US-born citizens.

The concluding chapter of the book draws together some of the key themes that have emerged out of the individual chapters. Importantly, the chapter identifies that the subject of this volume is likely to become increasingly important in the light of the challenge of a number of irreversible global trends, namely the increasing automobility of the developing world, diminishing natural and manufactured resources for road infrastructure to meet the growing demand for car-based travel, the rapidly changing age structure of the population and ongoing concerns about the social welfare of non-driving sectors of the population.

Karen Lucas

Evelyn Blumenberg

Rachel Weinberger

Editors