Abstract
Sustainable transport research and policy making currently identify multimodality as an important way to reduce carbon emissions and other negative transport externalities. This emphasis is consistent with the ‘behaviour change agenda’ for sustainable mobility, which places responsibility for changing behaviour on ‘citizen-consumers’, while policy makers help them make ‘better’ modal choices, rather than introducing regulatory or pricing measures. In this paper, we present findings based on the British National Travel Survey, which lead us to qualify the emphasis currently placed on multimodality. We first focus on the relationship between multimodality and CO2 emissions, at the individual and trip level. While multimodal trips produce less CO2 than unimodal trips over comparable distances, they are typically longer and therefore have higher average emissions. At the individual level, there is an association between greater multimodality and lower emissions, although of weak magnitude. Second, we investigate trends in multimodality between 1995 and 2015. Contrary to expectations, we find that individual-level multimodality has decreased over time, notably among younger adults, and this during a period of declining car travel distances per capita. We conclude that there is merit in encouraging greater multimodality, but this can hardly be the only or primary goal of sustainable transport policies. More policy attention needs to be directed to the pivotal role of high levels of travel activity, and the reduction of these.
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Notes
- 1.
Search conducted on article titles, abstracts and keywords on 2nd October 2019, search string: “multimod* AND transport* AND sustainab* AND NOT freight”.
- 2.
While the concept of sustainability is notoriously ill defined, it is generally seen to include three dimensions: economic, social and environmental. In this chapter, we refer specifically to the environmental dimension of sustainability, which is generally emphasised in accounts of sustainable mobility (e.g. Banister 2008).
- 3.
For reasons that are set out in detail in Heinen and Mattioli (2019b), we excluded trips including air travel stages, and the individuals who had conducted such trips, from the analysis of the multimodality-CO2 relationship.
- 4.
Our analysis included short walks (i.e. of less than one mile) as well as longer walking trips, and weighted both appropriately, so in our definition multimodal trips include e.g. those consisting of a walk to the bus stop followed by a trip by bus.
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Acknowledgements
The NTS 1995–2001 and 2002–2015 special licence data sets of the British Department for Transport (DfT 2015; 2017) were kindly provided by the Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) through the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, Colchester. The responsibility for the analysis, interpretation and all conclusions drawn from the data lies entirely with the authors.
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Mattioli, G., Heinen, E. (2020). Multimodality and Sustainable Transport: A Critical Perspective. In: Appel, A., Scheiner, J., Wilde, M. (eds) Mobilität, Erreichbarkeit, Raum. Studien zur Mobilitäts- und Verkehrsforschung. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31413-2_5
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