Key research themes on travel behavior, lifestyle, and sustainable urban mobility

The concept of lifestyle adds a behavioral component to travel models that used to be dominated by engineering and econometric traditions. This article presents an overview of how lifestyle is defined and measured in transport studies, and how travel behavior is influenced by lifestyles. Lifestyles are often used pragmatically rather than theoretically in the behavior studies. Nevertheless, some important theoretical contributions have been made, especially in sociology by scholars such as Weber, Bourdieu, Ganzeboom, and Schulze who agree on the communicative character of lifestyles: individuals express their social position through specific patterns of behavior, consumption, and leisure. These behavioral patterns are shaped by underlying opinions and orientations, including beliefs, interests, and attitudes. Thus, travel behavior is not simply determined by price, speed, and comfort but is also related to attitudes, status, and preferences. Because lifestyle has many different dimensions, a variety of measurement approaches exists. Nevertheless, most studies suggest that travel behavior is conditioned by specific lifestyles. How lifestyles themselves can be modified to promote more sustainable patterns of transport has not received much attention to date. This article argues that lifestyles need to be considered as dynamic rather than as static and given, and that future research could delve more deeply into this area

Grow, peak or plateau - the outlook for car travel

At the request of the New Zealand Ministry of Transport, a meeting of UK researchers and commentators was convened in London on ‘peak car’, a hypothesis that per capita car use is close to its maximum level, and may stabilise or turn down. In both countries car traffic forecasts have been overestimated, though current official thinking is that recent levelling off and decline in car use is a temporary result of poor economic conditions, and that a resumption of strong growth is expected in future. Research findings include features that may show evidence of structural changes in the influence of economic and other drivers of car travel, and/or demand reaching natural saturation levels where further growth gives little benefit to travellers. The discussion reflected diverse experience and judgements, not all in agreement, and mostly related to UK experience, though influenced by a growing international research literature, mostly empirical in focus, showing some important similarities in many other countries. Key features included:•There have been strongly divergent trends in different locations (the main areas of decline being in cities, with growth continuing in many lower density areas) and among different groups (young men showing a decline, women an increase), with noticeable differences by journey purpose, length and mode (rail use has grown strongly at the same time as car use has fallen). As a result the trends in national aggregate totals have been damped, not fully revealing underlying causes, and disaggregate experience has varied not only in size but also in direction of change.•At the aggregate level, evidence of shifts in demand predates recent economic difficulties, including decoupling of traffic growth and economic growth, reductions in propensity to learn to drive, changing land use and migration trends (which had previously been dominated by movements to areas encouraging higher car use, and in the 2000s reversed), growth of internet use, and decline in traffic levels in London and some other urban areas. These shifts have mostly been observed in the 1990s and early 2000s, including periods of strong economic growth.•Over the same period, there have been changes in transport policy and travel conditions favouring public transport, walking and cycling in some places, changes in tax effects on prices (especially company car use), parking control, congestion levels, and fuel prices. It has often been the case that policy changes, though worthy, are deemed to have rather small effects on travel demand, but there is a view that the cumulative effects may have been larger than expected, the resulting car use levels representing a new equilibrium to the prevailing conditions.Taken together, these features would imply that per capita car use is influenced by both economic and other structural factors, cannot be converted to total traffic levels simply by multiplying by population, and demands serious re-examination. Although all these features are researchable, there is not currently a professional consensus backing either the official forecasts or any specific alternative, and a strong implication is that methods of policy formulation and project design should test robustness to a much wider span of feasible futures than is reflected by traditional methods involving rather narrow bands of statistical uncertainty

Public attitudes to transport: Knowledge review of existing evidence

Report for Department for Transpor

Fasciola hepatica Cathepsin L Zymogens:Immuno-Proteomic Evidence for Highly Immunogenic Zymogen-Specific Conformational Epitopes to Support Diagnostics Development

[Image: see text] Fasciola hepatica, the common liver fluke and causative agent of zoonotic fasciolosis, impacts on food security with global economic losses of over $3.2 BN per annum through deterioration of animal health, productivity losses, and livestock death and is also re-emerging as a foodborne human disease. Cathepsin proteases present a major vaccine and diagnostic target of the F. hepatica excretory/secretory (ES) proteome, but utilization in diagnostics of the highly antigenic zymogen stage of these proteins is surprisingly yet to be fully exploited. Following an immuno-proteomic investigation of recombinant and native procathepsins ((r)FhpCL1), including mass spectrometric analyses (DOI: 10.6019/PXD030293), and using counterpart polyclonal antibodies to a recombinant mutant procathepsin L (anti-rFhΔpCL1), we have confirmed recombinant and native cathepsin L zymogens contain conserved, highly antigenic epitopes that are conformationally dependent. Furthermore, using diagnostic platforms, including pilot serum and fecal antigen capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests, the diagnostic capacities of cathepsin L zymogens were assessed and validated, offering promising efficacy as markers of infection and for monitoring treatment efficacy

Young people’s travel – What’s changed and why? Review and analysis

Young adults in Great Britain and other countries are driving less now than young adults did in the early 1990s. The Department for Transport (DfT) commissioned the Centre for Transport and Society (UWE, Bristol) and the Transport Studies Unit (University of Oxford) to carry out a systematic assessment of available evidence on the subject, both by review of UK and overseas published literature, and by new secondary analysis of existing UK data sets. The study sought to address the questions: In what ways have changes in young people’s social and economic conditions, and lifestyles and attitudes impacted on their travel behaviour? How might those drivers, or other anticipated changes, be expected to impact their future travel demand? The evidence has been evaluated on the basis of an extensive review of both transport-specific and wider social science literature in the UK (and other countries where, despite national differences, the trends show many similar patterns), and new analysis of data from the National Travel Survey (NTS) (1995-2014), the Census (2001 and 2011) and Understanding Society (five waves from 2009/10 to 2013/14)

Brief report on a resilience workshop for professional rugby players

This brief report constitutes an evidence based, evaluation of a resilience workshop for 328 male professional rugby players, with mean age of 25 and standard deviation (SD) of 4.7 years. Quantitative findings revealed significant changes in pre-test to post-test resilience scale scores. Qualitative findings indicated helpful experiential dimensions and those needing change. Integral findings pointed towards ongoing, humanistic, dynamic and systemic approaches involving all stakeholders in the professional rugby fraternity are recommended.This work is based on research supported by the University of Zululand, South Africa and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF)

A smart market for passenger road transport (SMPRT) congestion: an application of computational mechanism design

To control and price negative externalities in passenger road transport, we develop an innovative and integrated computational agent based economics (ACE) model to simulate a market oriented "cap" and trade system. (i) First, there is a computational assessment of a digitized road network model of the real world congestion hot spot to determine the "cap" of the system in terms of vehicle volumes at which traffic efficiency deteriorates and the environmental externalities take off exponentially. (ii) Road users submit bids with the market clearing price at the fixed "cap" supply of travel slots in a given time slice (peak hour) being determined by an electronic sealed bid uniform price Dutch auction. (iii) Cross-sectional demand data on car users who traverse the cordon area is used to model and calibrate the heterogeneous bid submission behaviour in order to construct the inverse demand function and demand elasticities. (iv) The willingness to pay approach with heterogeneous value of time is contrasted with the generalized cost approach to pricing congestion with homogeneous value of travel time