Exploring Temporal Stability in Travel Attitudes

Abstract

Many travel behaviour studies focus on the interaction between attitudes and travel behaviour, but in doing so have used a multitude of attitude measurements. These studies often use surveys where respondents are asked to indicate their level of agreement with a set of attitudinal statements. However, this set of statements sometimes varies very widely between studies, making it difficult to compare results across studies as well as complicating a thorough understanding of the motivations underlying travel. Whilst having a common set of statements would be helpful in comparing across studies, this depends on identifying a set of statements which are both temporally stable and stable across contexts. This paper addresses the first of these requirements using data collected from an online survey where the same set of attitudinal statements was asked in an online survey organized in 2017 and 2020 in the Greater Metropolitan Area of Sydney, NSW, Australia. Findings indicate that the same type of travel attitudes do indeed persist over time with these travel attitudes remain characterized by (largely) the same set of attitudinal statements, indicating at least temporal stability in the measurement of travel attitudes in a single context. Findings of this paper can thus be helpful in reducing the heterogeneity of attitudinal statements included in travel surveys.