Associations of personality characteristics with transport behavior and residence location decisions

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to investigate potential associations between personality and individual travel behavior characteristics. The explorations were based on responses to a mailback household survey from individuals residing in selected Chicago suburbs conducted in spring 1989. Three dimensions of personality were examined: social introversion or extroversion, affinity for suburban living and affinity for material possessions. Personality characteristics tend to correlate well with residence location selection, automobile ownership and travel characteristics. Specifically, socially extroverted people tend to make more trips, more nonwork trips and travel substantially longer distances by automobile for nonwork trips compared with socially introverted people. Materialistic people tend to spend a larger portion of their income for automobile acquisition; they also tend to own more expensive automobiles compared with utilitarian people. More people with an affinity for suburban living tend to reside in outerring, low-density suburbs instead of innerring, high-density suburbs. Thus, personality factors improve the understanding of transport behavior. On the other hand, personality characteristics cannot be affected by policy measures, while values for personality variables are hard to gather and predict. The problem of application of models with personality variables may be solvable for current (i.e. nonforecasting) applications if people can be classified into a small number of personality classes which can be assessed by a manageable number of attitudinal statements. As this study demonstrates, this is feasible.