Travel demand management policies aiming to increase the sustainability of urban transport often face the problem of overcoming unsustainable behavior patterns associated with the dominant use of the car for urban travel. Social psychology offers a series of persuasion techniques that are able to strengthen the impact of community based voluntary Travel Behavior Change programs such as the TravelSmart programs currently being conducted in selected inner suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. This paper presents selected results of two separate field experiments that have applied six particular persuasion techniques as part of a community based TravelSmart campaign. In a small-scale pilot test of 160 households, combinations of persuasion elements were tested in eight different treatment groups while controlling for a number of socio-demographic variables. Although not statistically significant at a 95% confidence level because of small sample size, the results still indicate an increase in participation when persuasion strategies were integrated into the TravelSmart recruitment process. Modeling the intervention up-take as a function of socio-demographic variables indicates the problem of linguistic barriers associated with a multi-cultural urban population. In contrast, bicycle availability and current use of public transit both have a positive impact on TravelSmart participation. In the principal field test of some 800 test and control households, the use of persuasion strategies yields a statistically significant increase in TravelSmart up-take from 51% (control) to 58% (test). These results indicate the need to explore an extension of the persuasion principles from their use in the recruitment process to at all other implementation stages of voluntary Travel Behavior Change programs.
Abstract