Packaging the Travel Choices: COMMUNITIES
Impacts of Travel Behaviour Change Programs
The growing worldwide experience with the application of travel behaviour change programs is providing valuable insight into the effect of these programs. Those effects or impacts can be viewed from a variety of perspectives: at the level of the individual, aggregate impacts and long term impacts.
At the level of the individual, it is possible to consider the types of travel behaviour changes which they produce. At a more macroscopic level it is possible to measure the aggregate impacts on travel behaviour. Extending that macroscopic view, the financial and economic evaluation of the programs is important.
An increasingly important issue is also the long term impacts of these programs and the need to include follow up, or maintenance, activities to sustain the changes in travel behaviour.
Impacts at the level of the Individual
The climate for change is produced through a variety of factors which relate to the manner in which travel behaviour change programs engage individuals. This is in part because people are choosing the changes that best suits their lifestyles, rather than having them imposed by someone else (e.g. through government regulations).
In parts of many cities, or in regional areas, which are served by limited public transport services, expecting people to make a simple mode change to use public transport may not be a convenient or feasible option. Presenting a range of options, including trip chaining or sometimes walking or riding a bike, maximises the opportunities to change. The motivation for change may also come from outside the narrow transport context. Highlighting many other benefits to the individual and society in terms of health (ranging from increased opportunities for physical activity to a reduction in social isolation), personal safety, road safety, local economic development benefits arising from greater trade through local businesses and other benefits for an improved quality of life, may hold the key to producing a change in travel behaviour.
The experience with IndiMark® is that it results in increases in public transport use as well as increases in levels of cycling and walking. Travel Blending® has primarily resulted in changes in the way in which individual’s use their vehicle. For example, by increasing the level of trip chaining (undertaking more than one activity while away from the home rather than doing a series of out and back trips) or carpooling (sometimes related to children’s weekend sporting activities) to reduce vehicle kilometres of travel by car.
At the individual level these changes result in fewer kilometres travelled by car, less time in the vehicle, increased public transport trips and increases in the number of trips and travel time by active transport modes (walking and cycling). The latter is important from a health point of view given increasing concerns about obesity and the level of physical activity.
Travel Changes for the Community
When attempting to indicate the level of mode choice changes produced in a community, it is appropriate to highlight that there is a good deal of variability in the results obtained across the methods employed and the areas where studies have been undertaken. A range of factors could be responsible for the variability in results achieved across countries with these programs including the underlying efficiency of car use, prevailing congestion levels, quality and extent of public transport provision, and cultural status associated with different travel modes.
Overall, it is fair to say that the results are positive with travel behaviour change programs consistently resulting in reductions in vehicle use, improvements in public transport ridership and increased use of walk and bike modes.
The South Perth application of IndiMark®, the distance travelled by car was reduced by 14 % and there were with strong increases in use of public transport (+21 %), walk (+16 %) and bike trips (+91 %). The large percentage increase in bike trips may reflect a low level of bike use initially with a modest absolute increase translating into a large percentage change (DTLR, 2002). Since no substantial changes were made to the bus services during trial, the increases in public transport patronage appear directly as a result of the IndiMark® initiative. In Europe, IndiMark® has been applied in a variety of case studies. Overall the increase in public transport trips averaged about 18 % (DTLR, 2002).
Quantitative results from the first Adelaide study of Travel Blending®, revealed a reduction in car use, measured in terms of car driver trips or kilometres, of slightly over 10 per cent for the population as a whole (Rose and Ampt, 2001). While there are statistically significant reductions in all the variables directly related to total car use, there were no corresponding statistically significant increases in public transport, bicycle or walk trips. This suggests that respondents were using their car more efficiently through increases in trip chaining rather than mode switching. Similar positive results have been obtained in other applications of Travel Blending although the reductions in car use are not always as high as those observed in the Australian applications.
Economic and Financial Impacts
Common questions which arise in relation to these (and all other programs) include:
- How much does it cost and can it cover its costs? and
- What results do we get for the money – specifically how do the benefits and costs compare?
Follow the links to understand the answers to those questions.
Costs of Travel Behaviour Change programs
Experience to date suggests that the implementation costs of IndiMark® and Travel Blending® are of a similar order of magnitude. The DTLR report (2002) notes per household delivery costs on the order of $75AUD for IndiMark® and $110 AUD for Travel Blending®. However there are substantial fixed costs associated with design and printing, so actual costs per household will decline with larger scale applications. To a large extent the costs of delivering these programs relates to the staff time required to conduct the dialogue with the household and to prepare the tailored information which is sent to the household.
Financial evaluation focuses on the extent to which travel behaviour change programs are able to pay for themselves through increased revenue from higher public transport ridership. Brog and Schlader (1999) indicate that the European experience with IndiMark® translates into sufficient additional revenue in the first year to cover the costs of program with a surplus after five years exceeding two times the original costs. An analysis in Perth (Kerr and James, 1999) found that the costs of applying IndiMark® throughout the metropolitan area could be recovered over a 30 year time frame under a high benefit scenario but not under a low benefit scenario. Kerr and James do note however, that under both scenarios, the revenue collected by public transport passengers would be higher than that which would be obtained without Indimark®.
Benefit/Cost Evaluation
Economic evaluations, which attempt to quantify the benefits and costs for the whole community, have been conducted for both IndiMark® and Travel Blending®. This work has involved quantifying both the costs of delivering these initiatives and the impacts they produce.
A range of benefits have been analysed and quantified in dollar terms. Those positive or negative impacts, which make up the benefits of the initiatives, included changes in:
- Travel time (savings or increases) for individuals or the network (congestion changes),
- Vehicle Operating Costs,
- Fleet or staff cost or expenditures for public transport operations,
- Accident and road trauma costs,
- Health and fitness, and
- Emissions and pollution costs (air, noise, greenhouse emissions).
The economic evaluation of the IndiMark® program yielded a benefit cost ratio in excess of 10 to 1 (Kerr and James, 1999). This means that every dollar spent produces a return to the community of $10. The benefit cost ratio for Travel Blending® was on the order of 6 to 1 (Tisato and Robinson, 1999) from which the authors concluded that ‘besides being intuitively attractive, travel blending appears to be economically justified, promising to deliver both private and community benefits, and potentially significant increases in social welfare’. The separate economic evaluations of the IndiMark® and Travel Blending® initiatives which have been conducted to date suggest that investment in these travel behaviour change programs yields a net community benefit.
Long term impacts
An important question, which is now arising in relation to these travel behaviour change programs, is whether the changes produced by the program are maintained or does everyone go back to using the car?
In the German pilot studies of IndiMark® the longer term effects were about 75 % of those observed in the first year that IndiMark® was rolled out (DTLR, 2002). On-going monitoring in South Perth has indicated that the changes were maintained and in some cases improved more than a year after the program was introduced (DTLR, 2002).
A small scale follow-up study of the longer term impacts of Travel Blending®, was reported by Ampt and Rooney (1999). Contrary to expectations, there was a further reduction in car kilometres, of just over 5 per cent, 6 months after the initial Travel Blending® program had been run. The sustainability of the vehicle use reductions was most often attributed by participants to the travel time savings which they experienced. In-depth interviews identified a number of reasons for the higher long term reductions in vehicle use:
- The need to plan or the inertia in their previous travel behaviour meant that some people could not implement the feedback suggestions within the time frame of the original Travel Blending® program. However, over a longer period they were able to implement changes which resulted in a reduction in vehicle use. The awareness generated by the Travel Blending® program motivated people to develop other own time-saving measures which reduced car use, and
- Changes in school, job or home locations along with changes in activities reduced vehicle use.
These initial results are encouraging. However, it is fair to say that this is an area where further work is needed to develop a more thorough understanding of the long term impacts of travel behaviour change programs and the need for follow up, or maintenance, activities to ensure that changes are maintained.