Motivating People to Shift from Automobiles to Walking; Appealing to People’s Interests in Health Benefits ( breakout presentation )

Abstract

Background Walking is an environmentally friendly mode of transport as it does not emit any greenhouse gases. Some organizations are trying to encourage citizens to walk to minimize the negative impacts on the environment. Nevertheless, a lot of people make a choice of by their personal reasons. People choose to walk regardless of how can be better for our environment. Rather, they choose to walk to stay healthy. Thus, we reconsider the relations between community management and people motivations for shifting from automobiles to walking. Description of Program This paper reports part of a large scale social experiment to promote walking, cycling and public transportation by providing safer and more comfortable road environment held in Tsukuba Science City in 2015. In this study, various pictogram signs were put on the road to guide people to shift to the cleaner modes. Some signs display the distance and calories we needed to walk to the nearest station. Other signs separates bicycles and pedestrians for safer traffic. For six months prior to the start of experiments, public meetings were held for the local residents explaining that the makes our environment green. Outcomes However, in the questionnaire survey held after the experiments, it was found that pictograms had the greater impact on the attitude of the citizens. The survey result also revealed the reason for the change of modes. Among the citizens who changed to walking, 74% responded that is good for health, 43% good for environment and 36% as safer mode. From this result, we learned the limitations of putting an emphasis on public goals such as walking and stop global warming to shift from driving to walking. Implications This paper addresses that to make effective policy which can encourage us to choose sustainable transportation modes, diverse and complex interests of individual citizens are needed to be recognized. The effective community management should be redesigned to be based on our personal emotions, health aspect, community involvement and enjoyment, which lead to Smart Wellness City to be presented in our accompanying paper.