Causes and effects between attitudes, the built environment and car kilometres: A longitudinal analysis

Paul van de Coevering, Kees Maat and Bert van Wee

Journal of Transport Geography, 2021, vol. 91, issue C

Abstract: Travel-related attitudes are believed to affect the connections between the built environment and travel behaviour. Previous studies found supporting evidence for the residential self-selection hypothesis which suggests that the impact of the built environment on travel behaviour could be overestimated when attitudes are not accounted for. However, this hypothesis is under scrutiny as the reverse causality hypothesis, which implies a reverse direction of influence from the built environment towards attitudes, is receiving increased attention in recent research. This study tests both directions of influence by means of cross-sectional and longitudinal structural equation models. GPS tracking is used to assess changes in travel behaviour in terms of car kilometres travelled. The outcomes show stronger reverse causality effects than residential self-selection effects and that land-use policies significantly reduce car kilometres travelled. Moreover, the longitudinal models show that the built environment characteristics provide a better explanation for changes in car kilometres travelled than the travel-related attitudes. This contradicts the cross-sectional analysis where associations between car kilometres travelled and travel-related attitudes were stronger. This highlights the need for more longitudinal studies in this field.

Keywords: Travel behaviour; Built environment; Attitudes; Residential self-selection; Reverse causality; Longitudinal approach (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692321000351

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:91:y:2021:i:c:s0966692321000351

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2021.102982

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Transport Geography is currently edited by Frank Witlox

More articles in Journal of Transport Geography from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().