Relationships between the residential environment, travel attitude and behaviour among knowledge workers: The role of job types

Abstract

Given the ever-increasing auto dependence constituting a non-negligible portion of carbon emissions, unraveling the travel choice mechanism is crucial to designing effective sustainable urban policies. It is of great significance to investigate the impact of the residential built environment and travel attitude on travel behaviour. However, existing studies have not yet reached a consensus on the complex relationships between the built environment, travel attitude and travel behaviour. Thus, it is vital to further integrate other domains (e.g. job/employment) of an individual's life course to comprehensively understand individual travel behaviour.By integrating a novel perspective of knowledge typology (analytical, synthetic, and symbolic types of knowledge) in the job domain, this article further categorizes knowledge workers into three groups——scientific, engineering and creative workers. Based on the web survey data retrieved from 738 knowledge workers and 3924 other workers in Munich, both recursive and non-recursive structural equation models are applied to respectively estimate their travel choice mechanisms. Results show that “residential self-selection” applies more to creative workers, whereas “environmental determinism” applies more to engineering workers. The travel choice mechanism of scientific workers follows neither framework, with respect to no significant link between their residential environments and travel attitudes. In contrast, there coexist “environmental determinism” and “residential self-selection” among other workers.Regarding that the scientists, engineers and creatives potentially associate with heterogeneous travel choice rationales, future mobility studies in the era of knowledge economy should further integrate the job domain. Accordingly, “tailored-made” spatial and transport planning should be embedded in the local industrial structure and the variety of employment.