Households on the move: New approach to voluntary travel behavior change

Voluntary travel behavior change has been used in most capital cities of Australia during the past few years. In a new approach, Canberra carried out a pilot test of applying the strategy specifically to households as they undertake a move to a new residence. Households that are moving are in a much more flexible situation to adopt new travel habits. Two primary groups of households were targeted. The first was households that had just moved (i.e., in the past 4 to 6 weeks). The second was households that have committed to a move but have not yet made the physical move. The methods that were used to find and identify households in each of these groups and the success rates of the different approaches are described. Targeting such households poses a number of new issues with respect to the voluntary travel behavior intervention that do not arise in community or suburban applications. A number of these issues are explored in detail and the ways in which these problems have been dealt with in the Canberra project are discussed. One of the key issues is to evaluate whether this intervention is effective. Although evaluation of voluntary travel behavior change is never easy, there are some specific issues that arise with households that are moving or have just moved. The issues relating to evaluation and then the procedures that have been tried in the Canberra case to overcome the problems are described.