Encouraging Behavioural Change Through Marketing and Management: What can be achieved?

Marketing and management measures – often colloquially know as ‘soft’ measures – can encourage a shift from car travel to more sustainable transport modes, and may also increase public support for direct actions to limit car use. These measures are often effective because many people lack information about alternatives to the car, even for journeys where good alternatives already exist. Other people may have a general negative image of non-car modes. Better information and persuasive marketing can help shift both attitudes and behaviour. Use of such measures is comparatively new, and transport models to predict their impacts in different circumstances are not well developed. However, empirical evidence suggests that these measures may have significant impact. The potential impacts of workplace and school travel plans, persona lised travel planning, bus information and marketing, and car clubs, if applied intensively and together, are such that 24 hour car travel demand in an urban conurbation could be cut by 9% – 22% under different scenarios. Synergistic effects could increase the impact. However, induced traffic could erode some of the benefit, if soft measures were implemented without complementary traffic restraint or road capacity re-allocation. Marketing and management measures should be attractive to policy makers and transport planners, because: they are politically less contentious than some other measures; offer high benefit-cost ratios; and increase the benefit of investment in new sustainable transport infrastructure.