Social marketing and the built environment: What matters for travel behaviour change?

Liang Ma, Corinne Mulley () and Wen Liu
Additional contact information
Liang Ma: The University of Sydney
Wen Liu: The University of Sydney

Transportation, 2017, vol. 44, issue 5, No 16, 1147-1167

Abstract: Abstract Social marketing and the built environment are two important ‘tools’ to manage travel demand which have had significant attention in the literature separately. Most previous studies evaluating the effects of social marketing programs have relied on pre- and post- surveys, using self-reported measures without any objective measures of travel behaviour change. Further, there is a lack of evidence on whether the effects of the built environment are synergistic when combined with other intervention programs, such as social marketing programs. This study contributes by quantitatively evaluating the relative and combined effects of the TravelSmart and the built environment on travel behaviour using objective GPS measurements. Between 2012 and 2014, daily travel data were collected using GPS equipment in suburbs of inner northern Adelaide, South Australia. Individuals in the households aged over 14 carried a portable GPS device everywhere for a period of 15 days during March–May in each year from 2012 to 2014, providing a total of three waves of panel data. The empirical analysis suggests that the TravelSmart program as a ‘treatment’ significantly reduced the car trips soon after implementation with longer term effects on reducing car trips in high-walkable neighbourhoods. For walking and bus trips, the TravelSmart program increased these 1 year after the ‘treatment’ with stronger effects on travel behaviour change for the participants living in high-walkable neighbourhoods than for those living in low-walkable neighbourhoods.

Keywords: Social marketing; GPS survey; TravelSmart program; Built environment; Walkability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11116-016-9698-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:transp:v:44:y:2017:i:5:d:10.1007_s11116-016-9698-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-016-9698-2

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().