Informational Interventions to Promote Pro-environmental Activity Travel Behavior.

y The technological advancement in the automobile and infrastructure sector encourages more and longer distance travel but at the same time, the way people travel to perform their daily tasks affects the environment a lot. Today’s urban transportation is a cause of growing intractable problems that primarily include traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and local air pollutants. It is reported by regional environmental protection agencies that the transport sector is responsible for the highest increase of greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades, and overall one third of CO2 emissions come from the transportation of people worldwide. In this regard, the continuous increase in motorized personal mobility is posing a serious threat to the urban environment and consequently facilitates climate change. This alarming situation demands the emergent need for sustainable transportation to control air pollution and mitigate climate change. In this regard, the possible strategies to promote sustainable mobility is based on measures that affect the supply of transport to the measures that influence the demand side. Regarding the supply side, prominent actions include investments in infrastructure to promote active mobility or financial measures to limit the usage of vehicles that have lower levels of sustainability. Measures about the demand side focus on making society aware of the negative impact of their transport choices and convincing them towards the use of sustainable transport modes. This can be done by designing and implementing approaches that potentially enhance individuals’ awareness level regarding the environmental impact of travel mode choices. Further travel behavioral change interventions help to transform individual activity travel behavior by reducing single occupancy vehicles and relying more on the use of public transportation, bicycles and walking than on private cars. In literature, these measures are generally referred to as mobility management or transport demand management strategies. In the domain of transport demand management, growing interest has been seen for the Voluntary Travel Behavior Change initiatives (VTBC). These initiatives rely on soft measures that can potentially influence the psychological factors that determine behavior change, intended as a shift from car use to more sustainable transport modes. The aim is to influence the decision making process by transforming individuals’ perceptions of the objective environment so they can alter their judgements on the impacts of the use of different travel options. These VTBC programs are utilizing informational strategies implemented from the community level using socialization and role models to the personal level such as tailored feedback about current travel patterns, personalized walking/cycling alternatives etc. Personalized mobility interventions that provide tailored vi information by considering the daily requirement of the individuals is found to be the prominent intervention approach aimed at encouraging people to voluntarily adopt pro-environmental travel behavior by reducing their car use. Although VTBC strategies have evolved from the simple awareness/education campaigns to the individualized travel planning approach, there are still limitations in the detection process of the pro-environmental and pro-healthy potential in the activity travel routine of an individual. Most of these interventions are designed and implemented without taking into account the highly contextual information related to an individual on which his/her daily travel decisions are based. So there is a need to identify soft aspects (i.e. easy to replace) of individual travel behavior with the potential to reduce the negative impact of mobility at a societal and personal level. Further, there are no comprehensive guidelines or rules available that can be utilized to determine such easy to change travel choices which also bring personal benefits, such as increased physical activity and reduced pollutant exposure. So this thesis is dedicated to developing computational frameworks that detect the rational replaceable pro-environmental and pro-healthy potential in the daily activity-travel routine of individuals together with possible impact by addressing the limitations stated above. In this regard, the significant contributions are setting up and implementing the personalized informational interventions by utilizing the pro-environmental and pro-healthy potential detection frameworks. To precisely describe these contributions, this thesis is divided into two parts. Part-I: Promoting Pro-environmental Activity Travel Behavior The first part is about promoting pro-environmental activity-travel behavior through the VTBC strategy. It contributes to this thesis by developing the replaceable potential detection framework, together with the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Personalized Informational Intervention to promote pro-environmental activity-travel behavior. These are further described in chapter 2 and chapter 3 of the thesis. Chapter 2 is about the development of the computational framework which relies on the developed algorithm to estimate the pro-environmental potential within an activity-travel behavior of citizens by considering physical constraints and objective reasons related to time pressure, family engagement, baggage, travel distance, etc. The data driven algorithm is developed based on a rule based decision mechanism where a variety of rules is set by utilizing the available travel behavior and transport modeling literature for activity-travel decisions. Three major aspects of activity-travel behavior, such as reduced car use, cold start of vii car engines and participation in non-mandatory outdoor activities are considered in assessing the pro-environmental potential. The developed algorithm is tested by recording one week activity travel diary of Hasselt (Belgium), Bologna (Italy) and Guildford (UK) citizens. A significant replaceable potential for car trips within 3km to cycling and car trips to public transport has been found. The replaceable potential of excessive cold starts and participation in non-mandatory outdoor activities were also found, to some extent, to bring positive changes in the environment. It is found that without having harder constraints, individuals are involved in activity travel choices that are not sustainable. These statistics show that there is significant potential in terms of environmental benefits if individuals are encouraged to change their behavior. Therefore, this potential is exploited by developing the VTBC strategy, as explained in the following chapter. Chapter 3 describes the design, implementation, and efficacy of the mobility intervention based on customized information in the form of personalized travel plans. This interventional pilot study was conducted with the aim to transform individual mobility routine towards an environmental and health friendly travel behavior, which can eventually contribute to reduce air pollution and mitigate climate change. By utilizing the computational framework described in chapter 2, web-based customized information primarily based on pro-environmental travel plans were developed along with pro-environmental and pro-healthy impacts. The effectiveness was assessed by comparing the travel behavior along with consequences before and after the implemented intervention. Significant differences were observed in an individual travel behavior regarding car dependency and active mobility with an effect size of 0.28 and 0.45 (Cohen’s d) respectively. On an average, 4.25 percentage points decrease in CO2 emission and 6.10 percentage point increase in physical activity level per individual was found due to their change in travel behavior. Stage analysis of the individual travel behavior revealed that the implemented intervention facilitated an individual’s travel behavior change towards more action-oriented stages. Based on the results, it is concluded that intervention is effective to promote pro-environmental and pro-healthy travel choices and can bring higher benefits when implemented on a broader level. Part-II: Encouraging Pro-healthy School Travel Behavior As mentioned earlier, household travel contributes significantly to spoil the urban air quality. Children who are from vulnerable groups are most prone to the severe impacts of air pollution. Children can be highly exposed to the harmful level of traffic pollutants during school commuting due to peak traffic hours. So, there is a need to investigate the air quality conditions on the school routes, and further, viii this tailored information needs to be shared with the escorting parents/guardians to influence the selection of a better alternative route to school. Therefore, the second part of the thesis is about the promotion of the pro-healthy active school commuting. It contributes to this thesis by developing the methodological framework to detect alternative walking/cycling school routes with air quality information, followed by the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Customized Informational Intervention to encourage pro-healthy school travel behavior. These are further described in chapter 4 and chapter 5 of the thesis. So, chapter 4 describes the development efforts for setting up an effective air quality based informational intervention that encourage healthy and active school travel behavior. Protocols regarding acquisition and integration of data sets such as individual’s school travel information, street-level pollutant concentration data, public and active transport network data were developed. A computational framework was developed that detects individual-oriented active school travel potential keeping in view the air quality. It is taken into consideration that the alternative routes identified are easy to adopt and encourage active school travel. Further to encourage pro-healthy active school commuting, an informational intervention framework was developed incorporating approaches and methods suggested in the literature for effective behavioral interventions. The customized information package (i.e. intervention tool) is based on contextual information, customized feedback (personalized route plans), description of personal benefits, and general suggestion on how to avoid pollutant exposure in an urban environment. Chapter 5 is about the testing of the developed route to school informational intervention to promote pro-healthy school commuting. In order to access the impact of the developed informational intervention, escorting parents/guardians (N=104) of school children from Antwerp (Belgium) were recruited. Current school travel information was recorded using Route2school digital platform. The processing of the collected data revealed that 60 % of the participants could benefit themselves by adopting the suggested cleanest routes to school, of whom a 34 % of participants have a significant difference of average NO2 concentration between the alternative and current route. This personalized information about alternatives routes with their potential benefits was feedback to each participant via developed intervention tool i.e. customized information package. Based on the feedback of participants that could potentially adopt suggested alternatives, 77 % have switched their routes. These results depicted that the piloted intervention was effective, and it can bring higher benefits when implemented on a wider scale. ix Each of the tasks described above has been successfully developed, implemented, and evaluated. Based on the knowledge gained from the studies conducted in this thesis, there are some lessons learned that could be foreseen as recommendations for mobility based behavioral interventions. These can be utilized by transport planners to develop targeted interventions aimed to promote sustainable travel behavior. More specifically, the piloted interventions described in this doctoral thesis shall be beneficial in contributing towards the employment of a sustainable transport system for a city/region by addressing the issue of excessive car use behavior of individuals. This will eventually help to control air pollution and mitigate climate change.

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Embargoed