The psychological factors influencing people's frequency of cycling commuting within the "bicycle highway" in Beijing /

Open in iSearch

Student Projects

2021

Xu, Bingfeng

Hong Kong : Education University of Hong Kong

Book

This thesis explores the relationships between psychological factors and cycling commute. The construction of the "bicycle highway" in Beijing gives the local people a new alternative to travel modes. In terms of the time-and-cost related factors, the shortest commute time and low cost were supposed to attract cyclists to use this new infrastructure every day. However, data shows that not all cycling commuters have a high use frequency, and this provokes the author's thinking. When people under uncertain conditions of transport, they are more likely to be partially rational. This situation could be explained by Prospect Theory (PT) which is used as the core theoretical basis in this paper to explore individuals' psychological mechanisms when choosing cycling commuting on daily basis. By introducing the notion of Sense of Place (SOP), a guiding principle in human geography, combined with the Ecological Model which had been widely used in physical activity research, the author was able to select and develop an original set of measuring indicators for this research. Correspondingly, several socio-demographic indicators, like gender and level of education, were also put into analysis. Besides, investigating the use frequency of the "bicycle highway" could quantify the cycling commute choice of an individual. All of these are preparations for further quantitative analysis in this research. We hypothesize that people who grade social-related indicators higher see higher use frequency of the "bicycle highway". Furthermore, we also hypothesize male should have a higher using frequency than female. To investigate these interrelationships, we conduct a series of intercept survey containing Likert scale attitudinal statements to measure 17 psychological indicators of cycling commuters within the "bicycle highway" and analyze the collected questionnaire data to investigate the magnitude and direction the different psychological factors impact on bicycle commute frequency of the local people. The analysis results indicate that social or interpersonal factors statistically impact the cycling frequency; Gender factor was also found to affect the decision-making progress on commuting behaviours

LG51.H43 hp BEd(Geo) 2021eb Xubf

https://educoll.lib.eduhk.hk/records/563OvKm6