Getting the timing right: using 'moments of change' to promote sustainable travel behaviour

Addressing climate change requires profound behavioural changes, including within transport. Indeed, reducing car use is one of the most impactful mitigation behaviour changes that individuals can make. Yet, travel behaviours are amongst the most difficult to change. This is partly because they are strongly habitual - unconscious routines triggered by contextual cues (e.g., 'it's 8am, time to drive to work') rather than the product of conscious deliberation of alternatives (e.g., 'which mode of transport would be best today?'). But since habits are cued by stable contexts, changes in context destabilise habits. Consistent with this, research shows that disruptions - whether concerning a person's life-course (e.g. moving home) or physical or social context (e.g. infrastructure disruption) - provide opportunities to reshape behaviours in new directions. Interventions targeted to moments of change are thus more effective than at other times.

While much research has explored these 'windows of opportunity' during biographical life events, such as moving home, retiring, or becoming a parent, less is understood about how wider societal disruptions (e.g., changes to urban environments) might provoke positive behaviour change. This PhD research will thus explore the impact that physical infrastructure disruptions (e.g., road closures, liveable neighbourhoods) might have on modal shift and travel demand. Further, the project will evaluate the effectiveness of interventions (e.g., financial incentives) promoting active travel and public transport that are implemented during such disruptions.

Working with a variety of industrial partners, including Transport for Wales and North Somerset Council, a series of three studies will be conducted which evaluate the impact of travel infrastructure disruptions on travel behaviour and demand.
The first study will investigate how road users respond to different types of road disruptions (e.g., varying in scale) with the aim of gauging the tipping points for how disruptive an event must be to provoke attitudinal or behaviour change. To do this, mixed methods surveys will be conducted asking road users to report how they would adapt their travel behaviour to different disruptive scenarios.
The second empirical study will involve evaluating and comparing real-life road user behaviour in response to road disruptions across several case studies. To do this, mixed methods surveys will monitor how road users' psychological (e.g., habits, attitudes, values), structural (e.g., experience of physical infrastructure), and sociodemographic factors influence their responses to road disruptions. Participants for both the first and second study will be recruited through a combination of paid recruitment platforms (e.g., Prolific) and social media platforms and customer panels of the industrial partners. Anonymous travel data collected by the industrial partners will also be used as objective measures of behaviour change.
Finally, a third study will aim to capture the perspective of transport planners and providers on how infrastructure disruptions are viewed and prepared for, and if and how positive behaviour change is promoted. To do this, several semi-structured interviews will be conducted with those involved in travel planning/decision-making within the key partner organisations. These will include the partner representatives already involved in the project and further participants will be recruited through word-of-mouth.

Impact Summary

This proposal has been developed from the ground up to guarantee the highest level of impact. The two principal routes towards impact are via the graduates that we train and by the embedding of the research that is undertaken into commercial activity. The impact will have a significant commercial value through addressing skills requirements and providing technical solutions for the automotive industry - a key sector for the UK economy.

The graduates that emerge from our CDT (at least 84 people) will be transformative in two distinct ways. The first is a technical route and the second is cultural.

In a technical role, their deep subject matter expertise across all of the key topics needed as the industry transitions to a more sustainable future. This expertise is made much more accessible and applicable by their broad understanding of the engineering and commercial context in which they work. They will have all of the right competencies to ensure that they can achieve a very significant contribution to technologies and processes within the sector from the start of their careers, an impact that will grow over time. Importantly, this CDT is producing graduates in a highly skilled sector of the economy, leading to jobs that are £50,000 more productive per employee than average (i.e. more GVA). These graduates are in demand, as there are a lack of highly skilled engineers to undertake specialist automotive propulsion research and fill the estimated 5,000 job vacancies in the UK due to these skills shortages. Ultimately, the CDT will create a highly specialised and productive talent pipeline for the UK economy.

The route to impact through cultural change is perhaps of even more significance in the long term. Our cohort will be highly diverse, an outcome driven by our wide catchment in terms of academic background, giving them a 'diversity edge'. The cultural change that is enabled by this powerful cohort will have a profound impact, facilitating a move away from 'business as usual'.

The research outputs of the CDT will have impact in two important fields - the products produced and processes used within the indsutry. The academic team leading and operating this CDT have a long track record of generating impact through the application of their research outputs to industrially relevant problems. This understanding is embodied in the design of our CDT and has already begun in the definition of the training programmes and research themes that will meet the future needs of our industry and international partners. Exchange of people is the surest way to achieve lasting and deep exchange of expertise and ideas. The students will undertake placements at the collaborating companies and will lead to employment of the graduates in partner companies.

The CDT is an integral part of the IAAPS initiative. The IAAPS Business Case highlights the need to develop and train suitably skilled and qualified engineers in order to achieve, over the first five years of IAAPS' operations, an additional £70 million research and innovation expenditure, creating an additional turnover of £800 million for the automotive sector, £221 million in GVA and 1,900 new highly productive jobs.

The CDT is designed to deliver transformational impact for our industrial partners and the automotive sector in general. The impact is wider than this, since the products and services that our partners produce have a fundamental part to play in the way we organise our lives in a modern society. The impact on the developing world is even more profound. The rush to mobility across the developing world, the increasing spending power of a growing global middle class, the move to more urban living and the increasingly urgent threat of climate change combine to make the impact of the work we do directly relevant to more people than ever before. This CDT can help change the world by effecting the change that needs to happen in our industry.