The Influence of Environmental Factors on Daily Behaviour

Abstract

The question of the extent to which the concrete physical environment allows, causes, or even forces certain forms of behaviour to occur has been excluded from social sciences literature for a long time. More recent studies from environmental psychology show that the built environment, filtered by subjective perceptions, very probably influences the experience and actions of individuals. Town planning and transport planning is orientated towards the needs, demands, or simply the observed behaviour of social groups, segments of the population, and target groups of individuals. However, at this level the evidence about whether a spatiospecific determinant should be added to the sociodemographic, sociocultural, or socioeconomic determinants is very inconclusive. This paper investigates the influence of certain types of area on behaviour, and uses about 70000 weekday records at the level of differentiated groups of people. Everyday behaviour of the groups is quantified by their time budgets and daily programmes with broad groupings of out-of-house activities as well as various indicators of transport mobility. This study shows that with given characteristics of the individual and his household a series of behavioural parameters does not vary in space and thus these parameters can be used as input for behaviourally orientated transport demand models and transferred from one planning area to another.

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