MAX - Successful Travel Awareness Campaigns and Mobility Management Strategies
Overview
Background & policy context:
Mobility Management (MM) and Travel Awareness (TA) have many advantages as soft policy strategies: They are flexible, adaptable, rapid to implement, and offer value-for-money. Several sustainable transport research and demonstration projects at the European, national and local levels have covered Mobility Management and Travel Awareness, but in isolated projects, limited to larger cities and pilot demonstrations. After the two biggest projects in this area so far, MOST and TAPESTRY, further similar projects with a focus on demonstrations would probably not deliver new insights.
The European research project MAX addressed the issues of the research domain 1.3 'Advancing knowledge on innovative measures in urban transport' within the task 'Research to support the European Transport Policy' of the objective 1 'New Technologies and concepts for all surface transport modes (road, rail and waterborne)' of the Thematic Priority 1.6.2 'Sustainable Transport Systems, and aims to bring new perspectives, to critically review and enrich the work accomplished so far by linking MM and TA and exploiting their synergies.
Objectives:
MAX set out to link Mobility Management (MM) and Travel Awareness (TA) in one comprehensive research project to exploit synergy effects in order to:
- improve the quality and impact of MM;
- contribute to proving the validity and success of MM;
- achieve the necessary standardisation (especially for evaluation);
- open new fields, especially in connection with planning.
Methodology:
The project focused on the following four research areas.
- Innovative approaches in Travel Awareness. An analysis of campaigning, advertising, social marketing (also in non mobility fields) will be carried out, studying how they work, and the underlying theories. Furthermore, the project will define, prioritise and select the main research questions (campaigning the campaign, credibility of the message giver, campaign design - emotional vs. rational, transferability of non transport campaigns, underlying behavioural model of campaigns, combination of hard and soft measures, impact of cultural background, linking awareness raising with education).
- Behaviour change models and prospective assessment. An analysis of the underlying theories and reliability of existing models and evaluation techniques and results will be carried out. The main research gaps have become quite clear. They are the theory gap (there is no systematic gathering of knowledge), and the method gap (evaluation is most often inadequate). A standard model of behaviour change and a categorisation system of behavioural change techniques will be developed, an own evaluation study will be carried out, and a new As a result a new predictive tool will be developed to be used by practitioners.
- Quality management and MM for smaller cities. An analysis of existing quality management systems and their application in general and in transport (EFQM, TQM, ISO 9000 etc.) will be carried out, and the different topics investigated (e.g which of the analysed systems is best for MM, should QM in MM be incorporated in other QM systems (for example environment) or stand alone, benefits and barriers for implementation of QM in MM, which elements of MM should be included into the QM process, how to maintain integrity and credibility in the QM process, development of a MM audit system for smaller cities (below 200.000), how to sell QM in MM to practitioners).
- Integrating planning and MM. An analysis of theory and practise of integrating Land Use Planning with transport and MM will be performed. The research will be differentiated into planning levels: national level, urban level, site level. A number of topics will be investigated (e.g. under which conditions is the market willing to accept MM regulation, what it could be the place of MM in the different levels, stages and instruments within the spatial planning (SP) process, how framework conditions influence the way in which MM can be integrated
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