Identifying the Nature of Travel by Different Transport Modes as Consummatory or Instrumental

Abstract

Attitudes are crucial in understanding people’s travel behavior. In this paper, affective and cognitive components are simultaneously considered, where affective attitude refers to feelings and emotions that are evoked from traveling by particular mode, and the cognitive component of an attitude contains the attributes and beliefs associated with that mode. Based on a mobility survey for the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel, this study endeavors to identify the relative importance of attitude components on travel behavior related to car, public transport, and bike, based on which the nature of mode-specific travel behavior could be determined. Being confined to the psychosocial sphere, the target mode-specific travel behavior will be defined as instrumental if a comparatively strong impact from cognitive attitude is observed and as consummatory if affective attitude has a larger influence on travel behavior. The identified behavioral nature is further examined across people with diverse characteristics. The dominant role of affective attitude suggests car travel behavior to be highly consummatory, which applies for most groups. Public transport travel is performed as an instrumental behavior basically determined by cognitive attitude, and this outcome considerably varies across population groups. Travel by bike is carried out by all the groups firmly as consummatory, and the negative effect of cognitive attitude on bike travel basically reflects people’s motivation to fulfill social desirability, which leads to a behavioral violation. The analysis offers a further understanding of travel behavior, which might provide useful implications for transportation administration.