How do individuals adapt their personal travel? A conceptual exploration of the consideration of travel-related strategies

Preparatory to an empirical analysis, this study conceptually discusses the influences of objective and subjective variables on the consideration of 16 travel-related strategies, reflecting a range of options individuals have to adapt to congestion. The variables considered here were measured by a 1998 survey conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area. The conceptual exploration shows that the consideration of travel-related strategies may be affected by the amounts of travel that individuals actually do, their subjective assessments, desires, affinities, and constraints with respect to travel. Individuals' travel attitudes, personality, lifestyle and prior experience are also likely to affect their current consideration. Socio-economic and demographic characteristics may exhibit distributional effects with respect to the options individuals consider. These potential influences indicate that the individual adaptation process may be influenced by a wide range of qualitative and experiential variables, which are often ignored or omitted by policy makers and planners. A companion paper develops binary logit models of the consideration of each strategy.