Travel with dogs: The need to accommodate “messy trips” in healthy and sustainable transport transitions

Abstract

IntroductionModern life engenders complicated travel behaviour. Daily routines are not simply standard journeys to work and school. Instead, our lives, and the way we navigate them, are messy. We attend multiple destinations for multiple purposes, chained together as households negotiate the demands and opportunities presented by cities. It is often the minor details of these complex trips that determine personal mode choice. Challenging these choices requires a more comprehensive engagement with these details than is currently characteristic in transport research. In this paper we embrace one such detail – travel with dogs. We base this focus on the proposition that dog ownership is an ostensibly health promoting practice that needs to be accommodated by a healthy and sustainable transport system. MethodThis paper is about ‘messy trips’. Messy trips are defined by two key characteristics. First, they are spatially and temporally complex in a way that disrupts conventional planning's prioritisation of consistent peaks and flows. Second, they are often emotionally or physically laden, defined by the need to carry a load or care for another. We use the way people travel with dogs to demonstrate the need for transport scholars and professionals to explore and understand messy trips, revealing a transport demand with potential echoes and therefore impacts across other domains of caring and connection. Specifically, drawing on survey data from 425 dog owners in Sydney, Australia, we consider three examples of trips with dogs. ResultsOur analysis finds that while regular dog walking trips usually occur on foot, there are other activities that people do with dogs and these activities are often accommodated by private car. ConclusionResponsible dog ownership is an ostensibly health promoting activity, however if dogs are not accommodated by sustainable transport systems, it is a practice with the unintended consequence of perpetuating private car use.