Mobility Trends Nationally and in Kilkenny

National Travel Survey 2019

For persons 18 years and over at an overall level, almost one quarter (23.6%) of journeys in 2019 were work related journeys, while over one fifth (21.3%) were for shopping. A further one fifth of journeys were companion/escort journeys. Over one in ten (10.4%) of journeys taken were for visits to friends or family, while a further 9.3% were for the purposes of entertainment/leisure/sports. 

Females were nearly twice as likely as males to make a journey for accompanying another person – 24.7% of females compared with 13.4% of males. This represents an increase of five percentage points on the same survey period in 2016 (19.6%). Companion/escort journeys are journeys where the purpose of the respondent’s journey is to collect/escort somebody else. Examples include collecting or escorting somebody to their place of education, collecting or escorting somebody to a childcare facility, etc. One in ten (10.1%) journeys by females were for visiting family or friends, while a similar number of journeys (10.8%) carried out by males were for this purpose. Over one tenth (10.2%) of journeys made by males were for entertainment, leisure or sports purposes, compared to 8.7% of journeys taken by females.

What would encourage people to cycle more?

Respondents were asked what factors would encourage them to cycle more in the future. Safer cycling routes was by far the most common factor cited (31.7%), followed by better health (20.5%) and more cycling specific routes (17.3%).

Kilkenny, a Cycling City

Historically, Kilkenny had much greater levels of cycling then the national average and nearby towns.  In 1996, 13.7% of the population cycled for commuter journeys.  In 2016, this had dropped to 3.1%, still greater than nearby towns and slightly higher than the national average but a sharp decline compared to 20 years previously.  The sharp decline in cycling for commuter journeys is primarily accounted for by school journeys for secondary school students as represented below.  This is matched by a rise in car journeys with a journeys by foot relatively stable.

The Gender Gap

From the 2016 census, for journeys to work and education, over 70% of those cycling were men, with women representing less than 30% of all cyclists.

Car Ownership

20% of households in Kilkenny City have no car

Rationale for Community Wide Survey 

This community wide survey was conducted to address the following:

Needs Analysis 

What wree the needs of the community with regards to mobility in the city, liveable streets and public spaces?

How has the decreased travel demand and subsequent reclaiming of public space following Covid 19 impacted on the community’s relationship with public space and mobility?

What factors have enabled increased levels of cycling and what barriers remain to cycling in the community?  

What factors may determine the propensity to behaviour change for modal shift?

Informed Decision Making

The survey will identify issues in the community that relate to mobility and will add to information gained through a literature review and analysis of mobility patterns in Kilkenny.  The survey will gather evidence on public attitudes to develop narratives about how and why cycle planning will meet a range of public interest and stakeholder objectives

Community Awareness and Engagement

The community wide survey and workshops will create awareness in the community of the project’s goal, to cultivate a culture of cycling within the community, and thereby gain community support and involvement and enhance the collaborative process

Sampling

The survey was web based and circulated by all local organisations involved in the systems approach. The survey was also available in paper format to those with access issues.  Due to social distancing, time and cost limitations, a non-probability-based (convenience) sample was generated. The sampling method was unrestricted and self-selected (Fricker, 2017). The sample was examined by chi square technique in terms of demographic characteristics (gender, age profile and principal economic status) and compared to the population to evaluate the strength of the statistical inference (Wang & Doong, 2007).  Targeted promotion on social media channels was engaged to try and fill quotas based on the 3 variables identified in the chi square technique.

Research Questions

The survey aims to address the following research questions:

What are the needs of the community with regards to mobility in the city, liveable streets and public spaces?

What are the perceptions of the community to the accessibility of the community?

What are the attitudes of the community to cycling following the Covid 19 response?

What factors may determine the propensity to behaviour change for modal shift?

What factors have enabled increased levels of cycling (Sport Ireland reference)

What barriers remain to cycling in the community? 

How has the decreased travel demand and subsequent reclaiming of public space following Covid 19 impacted on the community’s relationship with public space?

Survey Design

Mobility, liveable streets and place-making

The built environment has been widely associated with increased levels of physical activity (Frank, Andresen, & Schmid, 2004; Sallis et al., 2016).  Most recently, the built environment has been associated with all physical activity measures in 12 countries and on five continents as part of the IPAN project (Sallis et al., 2020).  The World Health Organization’s Global Action Plan on Physical Activity features “create active places” as one of its four main strategies (Reference).

This section of the survey asks about self-reported measures on the built environment. The measurement of community accessibility is based initially on the ALPHA European environmental questionnaire for community accessibility and land-use (Spittaels et al., 2009, 2010).  As part of the iConnect project, this 49 measure was reduced to a 13 item validated measure, Perceptions of the Environment in the Neighbourhood Scale  (Adams, Goodman, Sahlqvist, Bull, & Ogilvie, 2013; Ogilvie et al., 2011).  This was chosen, in addition to the community accessibility question, over the Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale (Saelens & Sallis, 2002), as the questions are more applicable to the Irish context. Cycling levels are influenced by land-use diversity, density and design and this is more important at the origin of the trip i.e. in a person’s residential area rather than the destination (Cervero & Duncan, 2003).  Hence, this question focuses on the respondent’s community.  Two questions were amended to be more cycling specific and reflect more recent findings suggesting the importance of segregation (Aldred, Elliott, Woodcock, & Goodman, 2017) and network connectivity (Lovelace et al., 2017; Lowry, Callister, Gresham, & Moore, 2012; Standen, Greaves, Collins, Crane, & Rissel, 2019).  A question, that asked about cycling and walking paths jointly was also removed. Perceived measures are reported as being more reliable for some environmental variables than objective measures of built environment factors (Yang, Wu, Zhou, Gou, & Lu, 2019). 

The Project for Public Spaces, through evaluating public spaces, charted the significance of four principal urban qualities: (1) Sociability; (2) Uses and Activities; (3) Access and Linkages; and, (4) Comfort and Image and their associated intangible and tangible measurements (Project for Public Places, 2016).  This was further adapted to take climate change adaptation into account and the new model is presented below (Santos Nouri & Costa, 2017). 

Carmona (2019) adopted a framework to asses the associations between four types of place value (health, society, economy and environment) and individual qualities, and conducted a systematic review and classified the qualities from those with very strong positive associations (required), strong associations, conflicting evidence and negative associations (avoid).  Carmona highlights the potential virtuous loops and concludes that place value and quality are highly interlinked, and place quality “is a basic necessity of urban life with profound and far-reaching impacts on the lives of citizens today and tomorrow. It is so important to our basic well-being that it should be the expectation of all”.  Additional qualities identified in the systematic review are included.

Additional qualities identified in the 2 frameworks above, suitable for self-reporting were measured. 

Social capital in the Irish context was measured using an adapted version of the 4 key aspects of social capital (Leyden, 2003).  The trust index used was the shorter version from the International Social Survey Programme 2019 (Muckenhuber, Johanna, Höllinger, Franz, Hadler, Markus, Marinović Jerolimov, Dinka, Krejčí, Jindřich, Clement, 2019)

Objective measurements were conducted where possible e.g. retail sales, crime statistics and micro climatic data.

Community Support to Cycling

Further statements were included to assess community support for cycling as conducted in recent national surveys (Cycling Scotland, 2019; NZ Transport Agency, 2019).

Attitudes to Cycling and Propensity to Change

This question aimed to elicit an understanding of attitudes and behaviours in relation to mobility patterns.  This approach has been utilised to identify attitudinal groups and understand cycling populations.  In 2006, Geller developed a typology of four types of cyclists according to their “stated level of comfort cycling on a variety of facility types, their interest in cycling more for transportation, and their physical ability to bicycle” and produced four categories: Strong and the Fearless, Enthused and Confident, Interested but Concerned, and No Way No How. This method of analysis has resulted in the identification of barriers such as the reduction of traffic speeds and increasing separation (Dill & Mcneil, 2012) and may be useful when used alongside other tools for planning cycle routes.  In a two city study, London and Berlin, mobility attitude groups were identified through the measurement of attitudes towards travel mode and travel experience based on the theory of planned behaviour, extended to the study of attitudes through four additional aspects: technology, residential preferences, geographic context and a cross city comparison. The identified groups were: traditional car-oriented; pragmatic transit sceptics; green travel oriented; pragmatic transit-oriented; technology focused individualists; innovative access-oriented.  These grouping can then be used to identify more targeted interventions (Rode, Hoffmann, Kandt, Smith, & Graff, 2015).  This categorisation is applicable to low car dependent cities with large public transport systems.  The theory of planned behaviour has been widely applied to examine psychological predictors of change in walking and cycling.  The iConnect project used a seven item measure, based on the theory of planned behaviour with the additional items to capture habits and perceived social norms (Ogilvie et al., 2011)  (Bird, Panter, Baker, Jones, & Ogilvie, 2018).  This tool has been widely used throughout the UK and Northern Ireland, in low cycling populations and this tool has been included here. Increasing the visibility of cycling may contribute to the perceived normalisation of cycling (Sahlqvist et al., 2015) and questions have been added to address this.

There is also a need to move away from framing transport analysis at the aggregate level where mobility patterns are difficult to change and move towards more innovative methods that will encourage people to adjust mode, times, scheduling or allocation of journeys.   The propensity to change may be greater than assumed or reflected in surveys and this has been demonstrated by studies conducted when people are faced with a disruptive event.  These studies have also shown that there is greater potential for people to adapt than assumed or than indicated in surveys (Greg Marsden et al., 2020).  This has been evident across the world with the disruption in mobility in response to the Covid 19 pandemic.  In Ireland, recreational walking and cycling increased by…%, the challenge lies to convert that to modal shift for other journey purposes.

Marsden et al (2020) found that shopping journeys were significantly flexible for many, and work journeys are more flexible than traditionally assumed, whereas caring responsibilities were more fixed, however “there is greater potential for societal adaptation if we can explain why it is necessary and what the benefits might be”.  

Research has shown that many people are multi-modal when all their journeys in a week are considered and the focus of behaviour change should be on intrapersonal variability, encouraging people to select alternative modes to the car where possible (Heinen & Chatterjee, 2015). Multi-modality is an indicator of capacity for change (Chatterton et al., 2015; Greg Marsden et al., 2020; Heinen & Chatterjee, 2015).

Barriers and Enablers

The variables included under barriers and enablers were those that have been widely reported in the literature and in recent national surveys conducted in two low cycling countries; Scotland and New Zealand (Cycling Scotland, 2019; NZ Transport Agency, 2019). Cost of parking at work and trip chain information variables have been included based on previous research in Kilkenny (Lambe, Murphy, & Bauman, 2012). 

Mode of Transport and Journey Purpose

The SWITCH project focuses on promoting walking and cycling as important alternatives to car use especially for short urban journey. It uses behaviour change approaches to encourage people to switch to active modes as the basis for healthy, environmental friendly multimodal travel behaviour.  The question on mode of transport was developed for the Switch Tool Kit (Switch Consortium, n.d.)

Town Centre

Questions were included in the survey to analyse the needs of the community in relation to the town centre.  These were based on similar surveys carried out in the UK on towns.  An additional question was included to assess the recent changes to the public realm, prompted by the need for social distancing.   Themes for this section were chosen based on The Town Centre Living Initiative (Department of Community and Rural Development, 2020) and a Town Centre Assessment carried out under the Intereg programme by South Ayrshire Council (Ayrshire & Centre, 2014).

Health and Well-being

As found in other studies and the general decline in response rates, excessively long behavioural measures may discourage participation in the survey.  Therefore, the single item question as standardised by Sport Ireland was used to measure physical activity levels.

After consideration of the following single item well being measures, the Eurostat question was chosen.

Again, to reduce the length of the survey, single item measures were considered for the wellbeing measure. 

All things considered, how happy are you now? Lorraine D’Arcy

Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? Eurostat

In general, would you say your mental health is: Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor? (Ahmad, Jhajj, Stewart, Burghardt, & Bierman, 2014)

Sociodemographic Factors

Present principal status was replicated from the Census 2016, based on the CSO Standard Principal Economic Status Classification, which classifies usual situation with regard to employment, approved by the CSO Classifications Board on May 6th 2004.  Age bands reported in Statbank dissemination tables were presented as band choices with merging / nesting of adjacent bands to allow for the smaller sample size.  In additions to the male and female options presented in the census, the gender question presented another option, to prevent discrimination against other gender identities. The replication of these questions (with minimal adaptations) allowed the sample to be examined by chi square technique in terms of demographic characteristics (gender, age profile, principal economic status) and compared to the population to evaluate the strength of the statistical inference.  Level of education was assessed using four bands reduced from the eleven bands in the census due to the sample size.  The health question was replicated from the Census 2016 to allow for comparisons with previous Census findings.

The following questions were also included in this section; car ownership, bike ownership and presence of a disability, urban/rural location and distance from Kilkenny.

References

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An in-depth qualitative study was conducted using different methods, to ensure a broad and diverse engagement.  The methods chosen were semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, community workshops and targeted focus groups.  Lastly, once embedded in the local authority, the researcher [BL1] recorded relevant meeting notes and memos. This approach  enabled the researcher to understand the challenges faced by key stakeholders working at the intersection of transport and health.  The needs of the community were identified, the silent voices were heard.  The researcher gained an understanding of the complex issues and the nuances that shape cycling patterns in a local context.  Diverse stakeholders were engaged early in the participatory planning of interventions.

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