The Overhead Wire Daily | Old Dogs, New Tricks

In Slate, David Zipper looks into the behavioral science research on why it’s hard for commuters to change their transportation habits away from driving and why it’s a major life event that may dislodge people from their status quo.

Many times what’s tied to these life events is residential relocation which studies have also shown is a time where people will reconsider previous habits. And in the article, David mentions that free transit passes and education of new homeowners are ways to push this a bit further.

It makes me wonder again if transit agencies should have a whole team devoted to finding people who are moving into homes, whether that’s through utility or broadband hookups or changes in delivery of the mail, and send them information about the transit system and include a free month transit pass.

You could even take it a step further and send someone to help people figure out how they would get to work or the grocery store or school. Kind of like a transport social worker.

This discussion also reminds me of one of my favorite episodes of the podcast we did with Dr. Jennifer Kent (Transcript | Audio) discussing family travel and different decision points in the life of your children where you may or may not jump into car ownership.

One of the interesting takeaways for me from her research was that the presence of children is a bigger determinant of car ownership than socioeconomic status and she notes four areas of familial travel that determine whether or not a family owns a vehicle; care work, craving predictability, spatial attributes of familial trips, and the transitory nature of childhood such as changing schools or changing travel abilities.

What often happens then is because of the policies and land uses that facilitate car ownership when things get complex, you’re then also socializing children away from active transportation modes as well.

As Dr. Kent says, “the thing that we haven’t really talked about is this idea of travel socialization with children as well. That the investment of a car isn’t just for 10 years. You’re actually socializing the child into that expectation of the autonomy that comes with the car and de-skilling them with taking public transport, using bikes and, and walking and so forth. So the temporal implications of that is augmented, you know, generation after generation. That’s how we’ve ended up where we are I think.”

With this in mind, is a major life event and residential relocation enough to jolt people out of a transportation habit if they’ve never known any other way? It may be a lot to ask, but in my mind it’s worth a try.