Travel choices in Scotland – the effect of local accessibility on non‐work travel

Accessibility features prominently in the developing transport policies of both the United Kingdom Government and the devolved Scottish Executive which aim to promote social inclusion and integration of transport and land use planning. It follows that a detailed understanding of the relationship between accessibility, personal mobility and travel behaviour is critical to the successful implementation of these policies. This paper presents the results of a disaggregate, multi‐level analysis of the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) dataset and attempts to unravel the complex relationship between socio‐economical circumstance, geographical access to local services and public transport and revealed non‐work travel choices. The SHS is a continuous, cross‐sectional survey and undertaken by face‐to‐face interview based on a sample of the general population in private residences in Scotland. It seeks to provide information on the composition, characteristics and behaviour of Scottish households. The survey includes a travel diary completed by a randomly selected adult member of each household. The dataset analysed in this paper was collected between 1999 and 2003 and contains over 75,000 surveyed households and over 49,000 completed travel diaries. An index representing proximity to local services at electoral ward level derived and a locational classification for each respondent which captures settlement size and wider regional accessibility were added to the dataset. The primary focus of the analysis presented in this paper is an examination of the extent to which the quality of local access to services affects travel distance for non‐work purposes. Individual and household socio‐economical circumstance, available transport resources (both car ownership and local access to public transport) and the wider regional geographical context are also taken into account. Given the hierarchical structure of the data used, a multi‐level analytical approach is employed to develop a model of distance travelled for non‐work purposes