TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE
TRANSPORTATIONOECD International Conference, Vancouver Canada
TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE
TRANSPORTATION
Our aim is to offer a socio-behavioural view of motorised mobility and to consider possible ways to get onto the track of a 'sustainable transport development'. We begin with a social-dilemma analysis of mobility and transport, its individual attractiveness, and its collective problems with respect to accessibility, quality of life and environmental quality. This leads to the conclusion that the collective problems of massive car use can only be controlled via significant changes in the transport behaviour of individual car users. To stimulate this, we discuss important conditions and six different policy strategies for social behaviour change.
In the second part of the paper we discuss major results from a four-year project including two field studies in which two general hypotheses were tested, via personal interviews and small-group discussions with a total of 875 participants. First, it was expected that the more people are confronted with the problems of car use (in densely populated areas, in city centres, or via advance information), the higher would be their problem awareness, the greater their feelings of co-responsibility and perceived control, the stronger their willingness to reduce car use, and the more positive their evaluation of policy measures. Secondly, we expected that thorough discussion and opinion formation in a group setting would lead to a different, more thorough judgement about the problems of car use and to a greater willingness to contribute to their possible resolution, in comparison to an individual interview.
As hypothesised, we found significant positive relationships among problem awareness, co-responsibility and perceived controllability, willingness to reduce car use, and the evaluation of policy measures. Moreover, respondents having a higher problem awareness actually used their car less, perceived more opportunities to reduce their car use, and were more strongly of the opinion that the government should take active measures to reduce car use, in comparison to respondents having a low problem awareness. In the second study, on average, respondents evaluated car use as 'a (societal) problem', but thought their own car use was 'hardly a problem' for society. Indeed, therefore, the problems involved in the massive use of cars can be characterised as a true social dilemma. In contrast to our expectation, after thorough group discussion many respondents had a lower score on problem awareness than before the discussion and in comparison to the first study. Apparently, people are confronted with a discrepancy: they perceive car use as a problem, but they are using a car themselves and they are not willing to give up the enormous advantages of car use. This evokes cognitive dissonance, which people tend to reduce by changing their beliefs about problem seriousness.
Charles Vlek, Linda Steg