Understanding daily car use: Driving habits, motives, attitudes, and norms across trip purposes

Journal article, 2020

This paper presents a classification of motives considered as relevant when selecting a mode of transport, and it examines the relative importance of driving habits, car attitudes, descriptive norms and motives for transport mode choices for commuting, shopping, leisure and child-related trips. A survey was sent by post to 3000 Swedish residents in metropolitan, semi-rural and rural areas (with a response rate of 34.6%). Through an ordinal factor analysis, three classes of motives were extracted: Perceived outcomes, Symbolic and Instrumental motives. Hierarchical proportional odds logistic regression and hierarchical linear regression models assess the relative importance of socio-demographic variables, motives, descriptive norms, car attitudes and driving habits for each kind of trip. These models indicate that the impact of socio-demographic and psychological variables varies across trip purposes. Commuting and child- related trips were primarily predicted by socio-demographic variables. Leisure and shopping trips were mostly predicted by driving habit. Driving habit was a common and strong predictor among all trip purposes. These results are evidence of the power of script-based trips to generate habitual travel behaviours across different trip purposes. Conclusions are made in the light of the usefulness of these results to practitioners and researchers who aim to foster sustainable transportation and to reduce private car use.