Moving between mobility cultures: what affects the travel behavior of new residents?

This paper analyzes the complex interdependencies between residential relocation and daily travel behavior by focusing on modal change. To help explain changes in daily travel patterns after a long distance move between cities the concept of urban mobility cultures is introduced. This comprehensive approach integrates objective and subjective elements of urban mobility, such as urban form and socio-economics on the one hand, and lifestyle orientations and mode preferences on the other, within one socio-technical framework. Empirically, the study is based on a survey conducted among people who recently moved between the German cities Bremen, Hamburg and the Ruhr area. Bivariate analyses and linear multiple regression models are applied to analyze changes in car, rail-based and bicycle travel. This is done by integrating variables that account for urban mobility cultures and controlling for urban form, residential preferences and socio-demographics. A central finding of this study is, that changes in the use of the car and rail-based travel are much more dependent on local scale, such as neighborhood type and residential preferences, whereas cycling is more affected by city-wide attributes, which we addressed as mobility culture elements.     

The Use of Science in Collaborative Management of Marine Environments

Collaboration has become a common alternative to traditional top-down approaches to environmental management and conservation. One critique of collaborative processes is that science is not sufficiently linked to conservation actions. To better understand how science is used in collaborative decisions, we asked how the use of science is affected by the structure of collaborative processes, paying specific attention to the role of explanatory variables such as stakeholder engagement, how information is gathered, and how decisions are made. Case survey methods (a form of systematic review) were used to analyze 30 case studies of collaborative management of marine, estuarine, and coastal systems across the United States. We found that increased stakeholder participation (i.e., two-way flow of information between parties), face-to-face communication among stakeholders, increased contribution of information from academic stakeholders, careful consideration and selection of participants (e.g., stakeholder analysis), participants' ability to influence decisions, and structured methods of collecting and aggregating information were all positively associated with the use of science in collaborative processes. These findings suggest ways to improve the structure of collaborative processes to enhance the use of science for environmental management and conservation.