Invisible commuters: assessing a university’s eco-friendly transportation policies and commuting behaviours

Ricardo B. Duque, David Gray, Mariah Harrison and Elizabeth Davey

Journal of Transport Geography, 2014, vol. 38, issue C, 122-136

Abstract: To assess the efficacy of a private university’s environmentally friendly transportation policies, we administered a transportation and energy-use phone survey to a random sample of faculty, non-professional staff, and off-campus students. Statistical findings confirm that our sample population exhibits the Environmental Attitudes & Behaviours (A-B) and Behaviours & Behaviours (B-B) Splits observed in past studies. Those most likely to report environmentally friendly attitudes/behaviours are also the most likely to commute longer distances and in larger cars. Moreover, the least-compensated university sub-population, non-professional staff (i.e., office support, grounds keepers), is significantly more likely to contribute to a dramatically larger per-capita percentage of the university’s carbon footprint from commuting. University pro-environment transportation alternatives at the time of this study did not consider directly this commuter sub-group’s structural disadvantages. This incongruence in goals and execution reflects an institutional variant of the A-B Split explained by the New Institutionalism perspective.

Keywords: Commuting; Diversity; Environmental A-B Split; New institutionalism; New Urbanism; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692314001069

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:38:y:2014:i:c:p:122-136

DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2014.05.010

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 ().