Abstract
The most common daily trip for employed persons and students is the commute to and from work and/or place of study. Though there are clear environmental, health and safety benefits from using public transport instead of private vehicles for these trips, a high proportion of commuters still choose private vehicles to get to work or study. This study reports an investigation of psychological factors influencing students’ travel choices from the perspective of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Students from three different university campuses (n = 186) completed a cross-sectional survey on their car commuting behaviour. Particular focus was given to whether car commuting habits could add to understanding of commuting behaviour over and above behavioural intentions. Results indicated that, as expected, behavioural intention to travel by car was the strongest TPB predictor of car commuting behaviour. Further, general car commuting habits explained additional variance over and above TPB constructs, though the contribution was modest. No relationship between habit and intentions was found. Overall results suggest that, although student car commuting behaviour is habitual in nature, it is predominantly guided by reasoned action. Implications of these findings are that in order to alter the use of private vehicles, the factors influencing commuters’ intentions to travel by car must be addressed. Specifically, interventions should target the perceived high levels of both the acceptability of commuting by car and the perceived control over travel undertaken by private vehicle.
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Notes
While the order in which the variables were entered into the hierarchical regression was theoretically determined, a second regression was conducted for exploratory purposes. In this exploratory regression, Habit and Intentions were entered simultaneously at step 1, followed by the Interaction at step 2. This model confirmed that Intentions was the stronger predictor, with a β of 0.575 as compared to Habit, which had a β of 0.248. Although both of these β were significant, Habit only accounted for 10% of the unique variance (sr2 = 0.1) compared to Intentions which accounted for 36% (sr2 = 0.36).
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Kerr, A., Lennon, A. & Watson, B. The call of the road: factors predicting students’ car travelling intentions and behaviour. Transportation 37, 1–13 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-009-9217-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-009-9217-9