Households on the Move: Experiences of a New Approach to Voluntary Travel Behaviour Change

Abstract

Voluntary travel behaviour change approaches have been used in most of the capital cities of Australia over the past few years. In a new approach to this strategy, Canberra carried out a pilot test of applying the strategy specifically to households as they undertake a move to a new residence. Clearly, households that are moving are in a much more flexible situation to adopt new travel habits. The idea of this application was, therefore, to intervene with households at a time when new habits are about to be formed. Two primary groups of households were targeted. The first was households that had just moved (i.e. in the past 4 to 6 weeks). The second was households that have committed to a move, but have not yet made the physical move to a new residence. In the paper, we describe the methods that have been tried to find and identify households in each of these groups and the success rates of the different approaches. Targeting households in this manner poses a number of new issues, with respect to the voluntary travel behaviour intervention, that do not arise in community or suburb applications. We explore a number of these issues in detail and discuss the ways in which these problems have been dealt with in the Canberra project. One of the key issues is to evaluate whether or not this intervention is effective. While evaluation of voluntary travel behaviour change is never easy, there are some very specific issues that arise with households that are moving or have just moved. We describe the issues relating to evaluation and then describe the procedures that have been tried in the Canberra case to overcome the problems.