Do men and women travel differently? The answer would seem to be yes. Men are far more likely to cycle or walk then women.
|
Travel Style |
Female |
Male |
Average |
|
Active |
29.7% |
41.8% |
35.0% |
|
Car |
30.0% |
28.5% |
29.3% |
|
Public Transport |
40.3% |
29.7% |
35.7% |
A few weeks back I divided all my survey responses into four categories according to their dominant mode of transport. The four categories are:
The process was relatively straightforward – look at the number of journeys made in each category. If the most frequent category was 20% more then the next most frequent category, then it was labelled the most dominant mode of transport. If the top two were within 20% of each other, then the furthest distance travelled was the “dominant” form.
The survey wasn’t representative, so it doesn’t matter much, but the numbers came out roughly even i.e. 750 – 950 in each of the three main categories, which means I have a fairly decent sample in each category.
Why are the travel styles important?
Well for the purposes of this blog, they’re an interesting and easy way to talk about who travels and how they travel. For the purposes of my research I’m modelling changes in travel, and the best way I’ve found to approach that is to model changes for each style of traveller.
How much is your car costing you?
For the last month or so I’ve been working on transport costs, specifically what it costs to own a car. Now the survey didn’t ask directly about how much your car was worth, but it did ask about what your cars year and engine size/tax band were.
From a combination of sources (Department of Transport Fleet Statistics, Vehicle Registration Tax Prices, SIMI figures, Car Sales Databases) I’ve estimated a value for every vehicle owned by someone who responded to the survey. Because the VRT is useful that way, I’ve also estimated the value of each of these vehicles in one years time. From that I’ve worked out how much these cars are costing respondents as follows:
Car Cost = Annual Costs + Fortnightly Costs*26 + Opportunity Costs + Depreciation
How did that work out?
Well for people who owned at least one car, the average cost was €4,281.
The average total transport spend for someone who owns a car is €4,735 vs €1,257* for someone who doesn’t.
*Note – these numbers are for buses, trains and car travel. I need to go back and include taxis which averages about €10/week across the respondents and are likely to reduce the difference somewhat. There are also a few other small tweaks related to people who use motorcycles, purchase bikes etc. that need to be made.
Take The Very Short Happiness Survey
The previous happy places map had about a thousand dots, this one has 2280. As before it uses the WHO-5 index to assign a “happiness” rating from 1 – 25. Twenty Five is very happy, one is utterly miserable. As I’ve ranked them for this map:
The average score is a tiny tiny smidge under 14.
The points are taken from the answers to the transport survey I’ve just finished, and the very short happiness survey people have been answering for me over the last few weeks. As before I’m still working on the bigger transport survey, but in the long run I will be looking at this data with respect to peoples travel patterns. Does access to good transport increase your sense of well-being. What if you’re commuting hours every day, or spending a fortune on transport?
You can take the survey as often as you like, just click on the link and you can share it with your friends however you like to!
There is a kind of assumption in research, in business, in the media, that people are fairly straightforward in their use of cars. If they own a car, they drive it and it’s usually the only car they drive. Some of that group would obviously travel in a spouses car occasionally. If they don’t own a car they don’t travel in cars that much, though maybe a spouses car.
My survey was deliberately designed to capture complexity in private vehicle travel. It first asked if you’d travelled in one, two or more than two private vehicles in the last two weeks. Then it asked you about the vehicle you travelled in most. If you said you travelled in two vehicles it asked about the vehicle you travelled in second most, and if you said you travelled in more than two vehicles it asked about all of them at once. Yesterday I put people into the 28 different possible categories based on their answers and their travel patterns. Everything from “travelled in one car only, which they owned” to “travelled in one car and one non-car, owned neither, car travelled in most”.
Most of the time you split people into these sort of categories from a survey and you get 40 – 50% in the largest category, 10- 25% in the next two or three and maybe 1% in the rest of them.
Not the case.
Completely not the case. The highest group was people who travelled in one car only, which they did not own at 20% followed by people who travelled in one car only which they did own at 19%. After that there are another 5 categories in the 5 -20% range. The smaller categories pretty much always involve non-cars, i.e. people travelling in motorcycles and vans.
This is awkward for the model I’m trying to construct at the moment, but it’s excellent both for my research and for the future as a whole. Less than one in four people in the survey travelled only in vehicles they owned, and even those people regularly had passengers or took public transport.
We don’t need to persuade people to share cars, they already do.
This is a happiness plot of Ireland. It’s taken from a thousand people who answered the transport survey, and uses the WHO-5 index to assign a “happiness” rating from 1 – 25. Twenty Five is very happy, one is utterly miserable. Or in the case of the map shown here, the blue greeny dots are happy people, white dots are muddling along nicely enough and brown dots are unhappy people.
There appear to be small pockets of happiness and small pockets of misery. Right now I’m working on other aspects of the survey, but in the long run I will be looking at this data with respect to peoples travel patterns. Does access to good transport increase your sense of well-being. What if you’re commuting hours every day, or spending a fortune on transport?
I also, because I’m interested in cities, want to look at the features of where people are living and compare that to happiness levels. That’s for about six months time though.
If you’re interested in this, you can add your own dot of happiness to the map by taking this two minute survey, or of course by taking the fifteen minute Transport Survey.
The five wellbeing questions in the survey are taken from the Who-5 Wellbeing Index. The answer to each of the five questions is ranked zero to five, with five being the happiest and zero being the least. The answers are added up and the lower your score the worse you’re feeling.
It’s used mostly as a preliminary screening tool for depression and there is evidence that shows it’s effective in that capacity. I haven’t found it applied much elsewhere, but I felt it was a better choice than some of the other approaches I’ve seen. I like simplicity. It’s also short, which saved on making the survey twice as long as it already is.
Playing around with the first 98 results, there is a suggestion of a slight link between time spent travelling and happiness but it might just be a desire to see something in the data. I think with more results, and with the possibility to control for things like employment, area of residence and a better look at types of transport more clarity will be possible. Personally if I can find there’s no link I’ll be just as happy as if I find there is a link.
In the mean time, I took a quick look at the scores of women vs the scores of men answering the survey. The men look a little bit happier.
Again it’s only the first 98 answers, so it’s deeply unscientific, but I like playing with numbers so why not? Today’s quick question is about the types of transport chosen by men vs women.
Buses and taxis were about the same. About half the men and half the women had used both in the previous two weeks. The taxis is kind of interesting, as you would expect that maybe women take taxis slightly more often for safety reasons. I haven’t looked at the number or length of journeys yet, so there may be a difference there. Men were slightly more likely to travel by train then women, 41% vs 30%. Women were slightly more likely to drive, 59% vs 50%.
There was a slightly bigger difference with walking. Men were more likely to walk then women, with 85% having walked in the last two weeks vs 72%. The big difference was with cycling though. Half the men in the survey had cycled in the past two weeks (52%) but less than a quarter of the women had (23%). Essentially men are twice as likely to cycle as women, and combined with the walking result, men travel more actively then women.
Or so it seems from the first 98 responses anyway.
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How Long Does the Survey Take?
My survey took an average of 15:57 to complete during the pilot phase. It’s sort of faster now. Sort of?
Well the average went up to 16:41, but that’s because two people stopped half way through and had a very long tea break. They took around two hours each. The average for everyone else is 14:16 .
Most people finished the survey in under 14 minutes, and a few people managed it in under 6minutes. I’m not quite sure how, maybe they just don’t leave the house?
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There are lots of simple and to be honest, simplistic, guides to “going green” for businesses out there. I’ve looked at them, and I don’t like any of them much. None of them focus on understanding what’s going on in your business, and making changes that suit you.
I spent a few years working as a sustainability consultant, telling people how to make their buildings more green and training design teams to think about the environment. For that I worked with BREEAM, LEED, CEEQUAL and a few other assessment systems. Like the simpler “ten steps to going green” stuff, they all have their merits and problems, but while working with them I learned them inside out. I even learned to translate their strangest parts into something practical you can do that’ll improve your organisation, and quite probably your bottom line.
I also spent the first year of my PhD looking at things like ISO14001, other environmental management techniques, green labels and environmental legislation. Suffice is to say, at this stage I’ve learned alot about how to look at a building or an organisation and work out how to make things more environmentally efficient.
The main thing I found was that too little of what I saw was that the long check lists were, well long, and boring. They produced advice that wasn’t particularly relevant, often difficult to implement and was frequently counter productive. I thought I’d start a series on “How to Go Green” for businesses and other organisations that focuses on understanding your environmental impact first, and second takes steps to change it.
There will be various parts to the series appearing over the next few weeks, it’ll get you started, but when it gets down to it, you may need an experts help.
