Ada Wolny-Kucińska (p), Agnieszka Dawidowicz, Małgorzata Dudzińska, Marta Gross

Bruno Rocha

Local governments are facing a considerable challenge of accurately verifying cities and the citizens’ needs while considering human mobility. The purpose of this policy is to plan and provide appropriate transport networks adapted to modern travel trends. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the previously planned investment does not correspond to the space users’ new needs.

That is why, there is a need for monitoring the dynamics of travel behaviour based on a comprehensive list of determinants that temporarily or permanently change travel behaviour in functional urban areas. On the assumption that people are increasingly adapting to unpredictable situations in a way that can permanently change their travel behaviour as well as admitting that the set of factors influencing their travel choices is expanding, the extensive list of conditions of changeability, with particular emphasis on technological innovation (opportunities) and threats that affect contemporary changes in travel behaviour should be created.

The purpose of this study is to identify innovations and threats that have an impact on travel behaviour in functional urban areas (FUAs), classify them and measure the level of their significance to daily commuters. A comprehensive perusal of literature was carried out to identify key players and key factors which can impact travel behaviour in FUAs. The list of factors of key travel innovations and threats which can impact communication habits in FUAs, was expertly assessed and on the basis of the expert survey conducted in European OECD countries the factors were ranked. Finally, the ability to monitor the appearance of agents in the space of FUAs was determined.

This research results will be helpful in carrying out operations aimed at the optimisation of the use of various means of transport, with environmentally- friendly transport being preferred.

Pål Wilter Skedsmo (p), Katarzyna Archanowicz-Kudelska, Anna Nicinska

Ada Wolny-Kucińska

Car ownership and school commute in Warsaw: A qualitative study of values, practices and narratives.

The objective of this study is to identify practices and attitudes to car ownership and transport in Warsaw, Poland, with a view to how a shift towards other mobility options might be envisioned.
This paper is based on survey data and focus group interviews (FGIs) from the CoMobility project (see below). The survey targeted school parents in Warsaw and we have carried out four FGIs with mothers in Warsaw who follow their kid to school.

This paper will contribute with new data on how parents consider car ownership and use vis-á-vis other urban mobility options in a post-communist context on their daily school commute.

Extant studies suggest that people have both negative and positive attitudes to a given transportation mode, but that this changes with context. It may not be the existence (or lack of) other transportation alternatives that directs peoples’ choices, but their ambivalent attitudes and motivational conflicts (Hoffmann et al., 2020). For instance, both non-car and car-users may hold more or less the same attitudes towards transportation modes in a given context, even though they choose different alternatives, e.g. that car users may share non-car users’ negative attitudes to driving cars in a city center etc. While the material we present also show these motivational conflicts both among car-users and those who do not use a car for the school commute, the data also provides insight into the different rationales and justifications parents have when choosing the preferred transport mode. Our data also indicate a bias among car users against public transport that can be challenging to overcome: In general perceptions among car users and owners relate car ownership to relative affluence and independence, whereas using public transport is considered ‘backward’ and dirty. On the other hand, those preferring public transport, profess the independence and the ability to multi-task (read e-mails etc) that using public transport offers. What might seem to be a big divide, is in both cases related to making moral justifications of their everyday lives.
A full papper will be developed spring 2023.

[CoMobility benefits from a €2.05 million grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the EEA Grants. The aim of the project is to provide a package of tools and methods for the co-creation of sustainable mobility in urban spaces. See https://comobility.edu.pl/en/about-the-project/ ]

Bruno Rocha (p), Patrícia Melo, Rui Colaço, João Abreu e Silva, Nuno Afonso

Pål Wilter Skedsmo

The present study aims to investigate the effect of the development of the Portuguese motorway network on urban sprawl across mainland municipalities. We account for the endogeneity of motorways using dirt roads from the late 18th century as instrumental variables.

We see Portugal as a particularly interesting case. The country developed an extensive motorway network between the early 1980s, when motorways were almost non-existent, and the 2010s – indeed, according to the Eurostat, in 2019 Portugal had the fourth highest ratio of motorways relative to population in the European Union. At the same time, urban land expanded very considerably too; between 1990 and 2012, urban land in mainland Portugal increased by 55.9% (for comparison, total population grew by only 7.2% between 1991 and 2011).

We document the evolution of urban sprawl in Portugal along several dimensions. Our simplest measure of sprawl is, as in most studies, the growth of urban (residential) land, which we complement with the population density in these areas. In order to capture the degree of fragmentation in urban land expansion, we also consider the number of separate urban land units (“plots” or “patches”). In addition, we calculate a measure of the “non-compactness”, or shape irregularity, of the urban units. Finally, we analyse separately the “central” urban unit – the urban plot where the city council is located – and the other urban units in each municipality. This innovation allows us to examine an important within-municipality source of heterogeneity, that is, we can analyse if the effect of motorways operates through the contiguous development of the central unit (typically the largest one in each municipality) and/or the development of other areas.

We show that, on average, motorways cause an increase in both urban land and the population living in urban areas; as a result, there appears not to be an effect on population density. The effect on the number of urban plots is particularly strong, suggesting that motorways contribute greatly to the fragmentation of urban land. We find that motorways do not contribute to the contiguous growth of the central urban units (mostly towns and small cities); conversely, the area of non-central plots expands, and the irregularity of their shapes tends to increase as well.