Travel behaviour in a post-socialist city

Abstract

Automobile traffic has been recently on the rise in many post-socialist cities despite EU policies fostering public transportation and active modes of travel. Against this background, the contribution of this paper is to look deeper into the travel behaviours of residents using a survey of 887 questionnaires as well as GPS travel recordings (almost 3 billion logs) conducted in the city of Poznań (539,000 inhabitants). Based on our analysis we found that proximity to public transport and cycling infrastructure seem to be among the most important factors influencing travel behaviours of inhabitants. What is more, their accessibility affected also residential locational preferences. However, we also observed that even in neighbourhoods with good accessibility, commuting by car plays a major role.

Keywords

• travel behaviour
• post-socialist city
• transport policy
• residential self-selection
• Poznań