Do People Actually Want Sustainable Urban Mobility Systems? A Residents’ Perspective on Policy Measures

For future transport planning fulfilling climate goals and reduce overall external costs generated by transportation, further policy measures need to be implemented quickly. Current research is providing an extensive list of measures and instruments to make transportation systems more sustainable. However, many of these proposals fail since single policy measures advantaging the one and disadvantaging the other group of travelers. We take this challenge as starting point to investigate which policy measures are attractive for which groups of travelers to identify the implementation potential. We do so by presenting residents in 25 large cities in Germany different policy measures. The respondents (n = 2,555) are asked to indicate their consent to the different policy measures in two steps: first, they see the measure only. Second, we present more information about the policy measure and outline advantages and disadvantages of the measure. Doing so enables us to understand which traveler type, i.e. current mode choice and mobility tool behavior, supports which policy measure and how improving information about it can help to find majority support. We find higher approval after presenting more information and a strong relationship between current mobility behavior and support for measures advocating this behavior.