Active travel incentives and behaviour change

Project for Bristol City Council.

Project details

Full project title: Active travel incentives and behaviour change project

Funder: Bristol City Council

Principal Investigator: Dr Ben Clark

CTS researchers:

Start date: September 2024

End date: July 2025

Project summary

Bristol City Council have been providing a number of travel offers to local citizens since 2022, such as free public transport tickets, access to loan bikes and bicycle maintenance services, to support people in the city with non-car travel opportunities. The Council have been running a questionnaire-based survey to monitor, for different population groups: (i) which travel offers have been requested, (ii) which travel offers have been delivered, and (iii) whether travel behaviour has changed in response to the different travel offer(s). 

The evaluation project being undertaken by the team of researchers at the Centre for Transport and Society (CTS), involves an analysis of the survey data sets to examine:

  1. which population groups are engaging with the travel offers scheme
  2. which travel offers are most frequently requested
  3. whether the travel offers are associated with changes in travel behaviour across the local population.

The quantitative analysis will be supplemented with a small set of case study interviews with travel offer participants to provide deeper insights into peoples’ experiences of travel offers - including their reasons for engaging with travel offers, the circumstances that enable effective engagement or not and whether and how the offer has enabled sustained behaviour change.