Assessment of active commuting behaviour – walking and bicycling in Greater Stockholm

issn 1654-7535

isbn 978-91-7668-805-2 Örebro Studies in Sport Sciences 12 örebro 2011

Doctoral Dissertation

Assessment of active commuting behaviour

– walking and bicycling in Greater Stockholm

Erik Stigell Sport Sciences 2011

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the School of Health and Medical Science at Örebro University and at GIH – the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences. He graduated with a Bachelor in Political Science at Stockholm University in 2003 and has previously been working with promotion of bicycle commuting within the Swedish Organization for Nature Conservation. His research interests include active commuting behaviour seen both from a physical activity and transport perspective.

This thesis aims to explore gender and mode choice differences in commut-ing behaviours in terms of distance, duration, velocity and trip frequency, and to assess the validity of four distance measuring methods in relation to a newly developed criterion method. In the studies we used adult active commuters from Greater Stockholm, Sweden, recruited both by advertise-ments and commuters recruited on the streets. The participants responded to a questionnaire and drew their commuting route on a map. In the stud-ies we found that commuting routes drawn on a map and measured with a curvimeter could function as a criterion method for active commuting distance measurements. We also found that four assessed distance measure-ment methods – straight-line distance, GIS, GPS and self-report – differed significantly from the criterion method. Therefore, we recommend the use of correction factors to compensate for the systematic over- and underestima-tions. We found three distinctly different modality groups in both men and women with different behaviours in commuting distance, duration and trip frequency. These groups were commuters who exclusively walk or bicycle the whole way to work, and dual mode commuters who switch between walking and cycling. These mode groups accrued different amounts of activity time for commuting. Through active commuting exclusively, the median pedestrian and dual mode commuters met or were close to the recommended physical activity level of 150 minutes per week during most months of the year. The single mode cyclists met the recommendations only during the summer half of the year. These finding can be used to enhance the surveillance of physi-cal activity levels from the transport domain and to tailor active commuting promotion campaigns.

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