Analysis of influencing factors on attitudes towards environmental and transport policy - A cross-sectional analysis for eight European cities

Katharina Sammer, University of St. Gallen

Keywords

Abstract

The success of measures in local transport policy does not only depend on the technical quality of these measures themselves but is also dependent on the political acceptance of all involved "stakeholders" of the transport policy. These stakeholders are local citizens, politicians, local tradesmen, traffic experts and journalists. All of them must be regarded as being involved in and/or concerned with local transport policy. Therefore the stakeholders influence each other more or less in their attitude identification. For example the politicians are dependent on the citizens for re-election in their decision-making.

The important question arises what are the main influencing factors of the stakeholders' attitudes? In the course of a statistical cross-section analysis on the databases of eight European cities (in and outside of the European Union) the influencing parameters were tried to be identified. The examined cities differ in their level of development regarding traffic, environment, economy etc. (e.g. environmental standards, tempo-limit, income, ...) and therefore give sufficient input at potential influencing factors. Based on the knowledge of the main influencing factors more successful instruments and strategies ("soft policies") to achieve a higher acceptance for sustainable and environmental-friendly, but not often very popular transport plans could be developed.