IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/itsdav/qt5bx856z7.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do bicycling experiences and exposure influence bicycling skills and attitudes? Evidence from a bicycle-friendly university

Author

Listed:
  • Thigpen, Calvin

Abstract

Life changes are often associated with changes in travel behavior, due to a break in habitual travel cues and the introduction of a novel travel context. Universities provide a particularly appropriate setting to examine how these life changes can bring about changes in travel attitudes, 27 norms, and skills – which together form a psychological construct called “motility” that describes the capability for travel. In this study, I pool data from seven years of the University of California, Davis’ annual campus travel survey to create a longitudinal panel, and use a retrospective survey to collect the bicycling behaviors, attitudes, and skills of undergraduates every year since they graduated from high school. I find that, on average, UCD undergraduates’ pro-bicycling attitudes decrease slightly over time while bicycling skills increase substantially throughout college. I then use the retrospective panel data to estimate a statistical model to analyze the influence of bicycling exposure and experiences on skills and attitudes. I find that riding a bicycle at any point during college increases both pro-bicycling attitudes and bicycling skills, while exposure to high levels of bicycling appears not to influence attitudes or skills. This study provides confirmatory evidence for the motility approach and suggests possible policy avenues, such as incentivizing short-term bicycle use in order to shift perceptions and attitudes about bicycling, with the intent of fostering a positive feedback cycle between greater bicycling attitudes and skills and increased bicycle use.

Suggested Citation

  • Thigpen, Calvin, 2019. "Do bicycling experiences and exposure influence bicycling skills and attitudes? Evidence from a bicycle-friendly university," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt5bx856z7, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
  • Handle: RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt5bx856z7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5bx856z7.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ramezani, Samira & Hasanzadeh, Kamyar & Rinne, Tiina & Kajosaari, Anna & Kyttä, Marketta, 2021. "Residential relocation and travel behavior change: Investigating the effects of changes in the built environment, activity space dispersion, car and bike ownership, and travel attitudes," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 28-48.
    2. Pérez-Neira, David & Rodríguez-Fernández, Ma Pilar & Hidalgo-González, Cristina, 2020. "The greenhouse gas mitigation potential of university commuting: A case study of the University of León (Spain)," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    3. Gabriella Mazzulla & Maria Grazia Bellizzi & Laura Eboli & Carmen Forciniti, 2021. "Cycling for a Sustainable Touristic Mobility: A Preliminary Study in an Urban Area of Italy," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(24), pages 1-12, December.
    4. Morgan, Njogu, 2020. "The stickiness of cycling: Residential relocation and changes in utility cycling in Johannesburg," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    5. Kamruzzaman, Md. & Giles-Corti, Billie & De Vos, Jonas & Witlox, Frank & Shatu, Farjana & Turrell, Gavin, 2021. "The life and death of residential dissonants in transit-oriented development: A discrete time survival analysis," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    6. Hidalgo-González, Cristina & Rodríguez-Fernández, M Pilar & Pérez-Neira, David, 2022. "Energy consumption in university commuting: Barriers, policies and reduction scenarios in León (Spain)," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 48-57.
    7. De Vos, Jonas & Singleton, Patrick A., 2020. "Travel and cognitive dissonance," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 525-536.
    8. Julia Janke & Calvin G. Thigpen & Susan Handy, 2021. "Examining the effect of life course events on modality type and the moderating influence of life stage," Transportation, Springer, vol. 48(2), pages 1089-1124, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social and Behavioral Sciences; travel behavior; bicycling;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:itsdav:qt5bx856z7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/itucdus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.