Vehicles for Education: Turkish Students' Beliefs and Views about Public Transport.

Abstract

The increasing use of private rather than public transport is impacting on the environment in a number of ways, including contributing to the major problem of global warming. It is necessary, therefore, to improve strategies to encourage greater use of public transport. The aim of this study is to explore which perceived aspects of public transport might be acting as deterrents to the use of public transport, and which might act as motivators to increase its use. To act as a motivator a positive characteristic must be both seen as true for public transport and felt to be important by individuals. In contrast, negative characteristics that fulfil these criteria are likely to act as deterrents to the use of public transport. A questionnaire was used to determine the beliefs and views of Turkish students (n=980) about such characteristics. Some characteristics, such as comfort, journey time, and timetable frequency and reliability were viewed as important and also believed to be inferior for public transport. We suggest that there are opportunities for education for behaviour change in terms of increasing student’s appreciation of the importance of reducing global warming and their understanding of the role that public transport could play in this, and in terms of increasing students’ understanding of the full economic cost of private transport.