Overview
At specific points in life, so called life changing moments, people often change their mobility patterns and a shift from sustainable transport modes to motorised individual transport occurs. Whereas data from Austria is only rarely available, data from Germany shows that walking and cycling trips decrease when children live in a household. The concern about children`s safety or the uncertainty about comfort makes active mobility unattractive. Additional barriers are trip lengths and the number of extra trips (e.g. consulting a doctor, leisure trips) which are necessary with children.
The reason that family mobility is often associated with a car is that people do not have enough information on the benefits and possibilities of active mobility. While the number of available active mobility measures is already increasing in cities, rural areas seems to be relatively unaffected by this development. To counter this development, the R&D project ANFANG aims to promote walking, cycling and the use of public transport as part of families' everyday life in rural areas. For this purpose, a concept on meta-level to promote sustainable mobility for families, will be developed within the ANFANG project which will be tested in representative communities in Austria. Data will be collected via interviews with parents-to-be and families and by workshops with providers of mobility services, local politicians and decision-makers.
The concept compromises various measures revealing:
- wishes, barriers, potentials and constraints to promote sustainable family mobility,
- potentials and barriers of multimodal transport,
- available products for sustainable family mobility, and
- solution approaches to promote active mobility for families in communities.
The ANFANG-concept will be available for a wide range of stakeholders (such as municipalities or local companies) for further exploitation. In order to achieve a more sustainable mobility development it is very important to promote active mobility measures. In addition to the positive effect on public health, the promotion of active mobility is a major contributor to achieve the overarching goal of the UN-Convention in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming.