The impact of crime and crime-related experiences, worries, and perceptions on travel behavior

Abstract

Although the risk of becoming a victim of crime in a transport setting is higher than in many other settings, research on how crime-related aspects impact travel has mostly focused on certain socioeconomic groups or certain modes, or by linking objective crime rates with mode choice. This limits our understanding of how crime-related aspects may impact decisions on whether, when, and how to travel. This paper aims to explore experiences with crime-related aspects in transport settings and how past experiences, together with perceptions and worry, are associated with self-reported alterations as a result of fear in travel behavior. In the absence of existing datasets, we collected primary data on experiences with crime, fear of crime, perceptions of crime, and travel behavior alterations as a result of fear of crime from 1,000 inhabitants in Great Britain. Our sample was representative in terms of gender, age, and socioeconomic groups, and revealed that experiences with crime in transport settings were common. Furthermore, we found that at least 25% of our respondents had experienced crime in any of the transport modes they used. We used ordinal regression models to test the impact of worry, crime experiences and perceptions on self-reported levels of travel behavior alteration due to fear. A previous experience of crime has impacts on travel behavior to a certain extent. For example, individuals who experienced crime while walking report an increased likelihood of not making a trip at all or altering their travel times. Having higher levels of worry is also significantly associated with an alteration in travel behavior. Women were on average more worried. They were also twice as likely as men to alter their travel behavior. However, stratified analyses by gender did not demonstrate that women were very differently impacted by experiences or worry. These findings provide insights into the extent to which travel behavior is impacted by experiences, perception, and fear of crime, as well as the existence of inequalities in this relationship. Based on our findings, we recommend including questions on social safety in travel surveys to enable additional modeling of these impacts, which may consequently help reduce inequalities.