Chapter 6: Drivers of Auto Ownership: The Role of Past Experience and Peer Pressure

In this chapter, we are interested in attitudes and preferences in travel behaviour and how they are learned. We investigate two main ideas: The first is that people learn preferences and change their travel behaviour habits based on their own experiences; the second is that people learn preferences and change their travel behaviour habits based on observations they make of their peers. If the first is true, it implies that people may carry behaviours learned in one context into another context, even if the same behaviours may now be less appropriate. If the second is true, it implies that two people with similar constraints and backgrounds facing the same decision may choose differently based on the behaviour of their respective peers and neighbours. By the same token, two different people may make the same choice because they have the same peers or neighbours. As a corollary, we are interested in policy decisions that are driven by those attitudes and preferences which, in turn, affect experience and, then again, attitudes and preferences. To the extent that these policy– experience–behaviour interactions are self-reinforcing, path dependencies are created, which reinforce modal policy streams, such as the auto-dependency path discussed by Jones in this volume.