Individual needs, opportunities and travel behaviour: A multidisciplinary perspective based on psychology, economics and geography

Reducing the use of the private car and stimulating the patronage of public transport, use of active and shared transport modes to combat congestion, climate change and improve public health and well-being are objectives that have prominent positions on the policy agendas of Western countries. Despite the efforts of scientists, policy makers and public and private investors, many transport problems seem hard to solve. This might be due to the following factors. Firstly, economic growth and the increase in population size (largely caused by net migration) and expansion of the number of households are relatively autonomous processes which are largely outside the control of at least transport policy makers. These could have an impact on the volume of traffic. Secondly, many interventions in transport are not sufficiently focused on all relevant determinants and not coordinated and as a consequence, suffer in their effectiveness. For example, investments in public transport are often not accompanied by pricing measures on car use. Yet, congestion charging in London, Stockholm and Singapore (Metz, 2018) show the effectiveness of a combination of policies. The emerging concept of MaaS (Mobility-as-aService) has the objective to integrate transport modes and mobility services into one mobility service accessible on demand, but it is unclear how to stimulate adoption of these services and whether and under which conditions the public will adopt these (Butler et al., 2021; Arias-Molinares and García-Palomares, 2020). The final reason for difficulties in solving the above-mentioned transport problems is, that car use is highly habitual (Ramos et al., 2020), which could be modified when choice situations change substantially (...)