To all members of the TRI-TSUG Scotland Group jiscmail list:

Those of you who attended our successful seminar in Edinburgh on 13th June
will have enjoyed the excellent presentation by Scott Le Vine on the work
which he and others carried out for Transport Scotland to investigate trends
in car, rail and bus travel in Scotland over the period 1995-2010.  We said
that we would seek to use this jiscmail list to carry on the discussion
which ensued at the seminar.

One of the key messages which I drew from Scott's presentation was the need
for closer monitoring of trends in travel by young people aged 17-29.  It
would seem that licence holding and car use has fallen markedly for young
people in the last decade, with some evidence that this may be linked to
changing patterns of social and economic activity.  However, there is
clearly much more we need to understand about travel by young people and
their attitudes toward car ownership before we can say whether the trends
being seen represent a permanent change in lifestyle or merely a deferment
of aspirations to later years.

It was suggested that, with the National Travel Survey no longer covering
Scotland, it might be desirable to consider using the Scottish Household
Survey (SHS) to seek to monitor more closely the patterns of travel by young
people.  However, as Andrew Paterson pointed out, the inclusion of any
additional questions in the SHS would probably have to be at the expense of
dropping other questions.  Also, it would inevitably be some years before
any trends could be clearly discerned from the SHS.

In my view we cannot afford to ignore the trends being seen - which, if
permanent, could have major implications for transport policy.  I suggest
that we need fairly urgently to begin to try to understand better why these
trends are occurring and in particular how attitudes towards licence
holding, car use and the need to travel may be changing amongst young
people.  To this end, I wonder if there could be a case for Transport
Scotland (and/or others) mounting a one-off in-depth study of the attitudes
of young people to travel and car use.

Perhaps others would care to comment on this suggestion, or raise their own
questions about the findings presented by Scott?    His report has been
published today and can be found on the Transport Scotland website at:
http://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/downloadables/on_
the_move_scotland-latinopoulos_et_al-jun2013.pdf

Regards,

Jock Robertson.

Dr Jock Robertson
Committee Member, Transport Statistics Users Group.