Road Pricing and Older People: An In-depth Study of Attitudes, Pro-Social Values and Social Norms.

Understanding the socio-psychological mechanisms that determine the public acceptability of road pricing could be a key for its implementation in urban environments where this is a viable scenario. Studying the attitudes of older people is of particular importance due to the ageing of the populations in the industrialised democracies, the high political engagement of older people, and their vulnerability to transport-related social exclusion. Research by the present authors had previously identified that older people's beliefs about what is the normal, acceptable, or even expected choice in a particular social context (“social norms”) and their tendency to favour, more than any other age group, what is positively valued by society (“pro-social value orientation”) affect their attitudes to road pricing. The present paper aims to develop an in-depth understanding of these attitude-shaping determinants drawing on the findings of focus groups conducted in Bristol, UK. The findings suggest that there are three distinctive expressions of pro-sociality: pro-environmental values and generativity on the one hand, these two being drivers of support for road pricing, and pro-equity values on the other, which tend to drive opposition. Social norms have two particular expressions: subjective norms (i.e. norms reflecting people’s immediate social environment) and norms referring to others and society in general. Furthermore, a theory-driven thematic analysis indicates that trust in the integrity of the concept and older age as a life stage associated with ageing, retirement, lower income, mobility barriers and deteriorating health are important in how attitudes reflecting and affecting public acceptability to road pricing form

CATCH (Carbon-Aware Travel Choice in the City, Region and World of Tomorrow): D1.3 Monitoring and evaluation report

The CATCH project was a three year project to address a gap in awareness of urban transport Greenhouse Gases (GHG). The project‟s mission is “to become the natural place to look for mobility related GHG reduction advice and information”. This has been pursued by building an internet-based resource “Knowledge Engine” which engages, informs and stimulates stakeholders at different levels to tackle transport related emissions in their urban centres. The CATCH platform provides objective, comprehensive and timely information to facilitate stakeholders to identify policies to reduce GHG from urban mobility, and empower them in making informed, innovative, and effective change.This report details work done in task 1.4 (T1.4), Monitoring and Evaluation. There were three main objectives for this task: To evaluate the success of the platform design in terms of objectives (and specifically in increasing awareness on transport CO2); To establish a connection between the grounding work of D1.11 and D1.22 and the platform design of the final product; To examine the effect of the platform design on awareness of transport CO2 and motivation or intention to lower transport CO2 emissions

Editorial: recent developments in prospect theory-based travel behaviour research

Prospect theory, a descriptive approach of modeling individual choice making which has been applied in a range of contexts, has recently attracted the interest oftransport academics and professionals and is seen by many as a promising framework for travel behaviour modelling. This special issue follows a seminar on prospect theory and its applications to transport held in Delft at October 2009. It features a selection of carefully reviewed papers that were presented at the seminar. This special issue aims to expose the reader to the recent developments in this field and to some particularly relevant theoretical discussions, potential applications and critical views of prospect theory and its potential applications in the study of travel behaviour

Public Attitudes to Road Pricing: Exploring the Role of Older Age, Pro-Sociality, Social Norms and Trust

Understanding the socio-psychological mechanisms that determine the public acceptability of road pricing could be a key for its implementation in urban environments where this is a viable scenario. Studying the attitudes of older people is of particular importance due to the aging of the populations in the industrialized democracies, the high political engagement of older people, and their vulnerability to transport-related social exclusion. Research by the present authors had previously identified that older people's beliefs about what is the normal, acceptable, or even expected choice in a particular social context (“social norms”) and their tendency to favor, more than any other age group, what is positively valued by society (“pro-social value orientation”) affect their attitudes to road pricing. The present paper aims to develop an in-depth understanding of these attitude-shaping determinants drawing on the findings of focus groups conducted in Bristol, UK. The findings suggest that there are three distinctive expressions of pro-sociality: pro-environmental values and generativity on the one hand, these two being drivers of support for road pricing, and pro-equity values on the other, which tend to drive opposition. Social norms have two particular expressions: subjective norms (i.e. norms reflecting people’s immediate social environment) and norms referring to others and society in general. Furthermore, a theory-driven thematic analysis indicates that trust in the integrity of the concept and older age as a life stage associated with aging, retirement, lower income, mobility barriers and deteriorating health are important in how attitudes reflecting and affecting public acceptability to road pricing for

Report on data analysis and GHG emissions estimates related to travel choice (EU FP7 CATCH Project Deliverable 3.2)

This report describes the objectives and activities defined and carried out by task 3.2 “Data Collection/Collation/Specification” within Work Package 3 in CATCH.The Carbon Aware Travel Choice (CATCH) project was developed in response to the FP7 call for proposals that would help cities to reduce the amount of CO2 produced by travel choices. Alternative fuel technologies, sustainable transport policies, and new technologies applied to support mobility (and virtual mobility) are being developed and fine tuned throughout Europe. These technologies offer opportunities to move towards a more sustainable future. However, despite a range of initiatives, most of which are supported through projects funded by the European Commission, there is still a need for a trusted and easily accessible resource which enables travellers, policy makers and operators, and other stakeholders, to determine appropriate actions to address the growing environmental challenge of reducing the carbon dioxide emissions from urban transport by encouraging carbon-friendly travel choices. In response to that, the CATCH project aims to develop a knowledge engine to inject carbon reduction into the public’s and policy maker’s decision making . This will be an online knowledge platform that aims to:•support city stakeholders to develop sustainable transport policies;•motivate travellers to adopt sustainable transport choices. The CATCH project has developed a knowledge platform that includes two tools that allow for visualisation of data at the city level (the co-benefit tool, also called “My City”, and the Scenario tool, developed in WP4). The input to both tools is the GHG and Performance Database. The database structure was initially developed in T3.1 and described in D3.1. This document describes how data was identified and assessed, and how the database has been populated with relevant data as well as the estimation of city-specific per-capita road transport CO2 emissions. Road transport CO2 emissions were estimated by using the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR), GIS data and the application of a ‘top-down’ methodology. The publishing in 2011 of a spatially disaggregated inventory of a range of diffuse atmospheric emissions based on the E-PRTR marked a significant advance in understanding variations in emissions from various sources Europe. Through this release, the CATCH platform was able to estimate city-level road transport CO2 emissions for over one hundred cities. Over 40 different indicators had sufficient coverage for the 149 cities for which per-capita road transport CO2 emissions estimates were created. That data feeds the My City tool of WP4. The My City tool allows for cities to be compared and ranks them according to their per-capita road transport CO2 emissions (and other indicators, or ‘co-benefits’). Further, it uses the 43 indicators to show how the cities are performing in six different policy areas. The data that feeds into the Scenario tool is not as expansive. However, over seventy cities were identified that had 10 common indicators with at least three distinct results. Currently, the only transport indicator is car ownership and it is not possible to include CO2 emissions estimates as only one year exists in the E-PRTR data.Future directions of this work include expanding and building upon the indicators that are available for both tools. In particular, now that a baseline has been established using the E-PRTR, accurate historic data and future versions of the E-PRTR data would allow for trending

Strategic review of travel information research

Report to The Department for Transport, London, U