Do Personal Norms Predict Citizens’ Acceptance of Green Transport Policies in China

Abstract

In order to solve the environmental problems caused by the increasing private car use in China, such as transport energy consumption, traffic congestion, and air pollution, many policy measures including car purchase taxes, restrictions on car use in the city center, and incentives to promote electric vehicles have been developed. By taking Hangzhou, a low-carbon metropolitan city in China, as an illustrative example, green transport policies have been proactively implemented in order to turn the metropolitan city into an ecologically livable city. However, citizens’ acceptance of comprehensive green transport policies has seldom been studied and explored, which is actually quite valuable information for implementing and assessing the effectiveness of green transport policies. This study presents a new integrated framework by extending the value belief norm (VBN) theory in order to explore the internal factors for predicting citizens’ acceptance of comprehensive green transport policies and other pro-environmental behaviors in the transport field. A survey on car use reduction was conducted among citizens in Hangzhou and a quantitative analysis was performed using a structural equation model (SEM) method. Results show that personal norms can successfully predict citizens’ acceptance of pull policies for reducing car use, while is less capable of predicting that of push ones. The theoretical implications of different pro-environmental behaviors are explained. This analysis may inspire policy makers to implement appropriate policies to encourage the public to use low-carbon transport in daily life.

Land suitability assessment for supporting transport planning based on carrying capacity and construction demand

“…Secondly, the previous transport planning has aimed to meet the needs of economic development, paying more attention to the feasibility of engineering construction, while the concept of ecological protection has been still lacking. And the comprehensive protection of land space is less considered [ 15 ]. The aim of the national spatial planning based on ecological civilization is to restrict the disorderly expansion of urban, and to ensure that the ecological and agricultural space is not largely occupied [ 16 ].…”

Understanding the determinants for predicting citizens’ travel mode change from private cars to public transport in China

“…The NAM suggests that AC is a guiding construct, which could either directly activate PN or indirectly influence PN through AR. Besides, both the direct and indirect effects of AC were confirmed for predicting citizens' acceptance of green transport policies in China (Zhang et al, 2020b). The NAM has been successfully applied to predict proenvironmental intentions and behaviors in different research domains due to its excellent analytical capability (Zhang et al, 2018).…”

“…Hangzhou was selected as the case study because it is a representative first-tier city with booming economy and heavy traffic in China. In addition, local government has invested heavily in public transport to alleviate traffic problems in recent years, and citizens are found to be supportive of local public transport policies ( Zhang et al, 2020b ).…”

“…Additionally, pro-environmental motivations may also help reduce private cars ( Bamberg et al, 2007 ). Recently, Zhang et al (2020b) found that awareness of the negative environmental consequences of using private cars could predict citizens’ intention to reduce car use. Nevertheless, studies concerning the negative aspects of driving that may lead to travel mode change are relatively rare in the existing literature.…”

“…However, the declared intention is not identical variable to the actual behavior, and it has been found that an intention-behavior gap may exist in pro-environmental behaviors ( Zhang et al, 2020a ). In our previous work, it has been found that Hangzhou citizens are supportive of local public transport policies and have intention to reduce car use ( Zhang et al, 2020b ), but the problems caused by private cars are still far from being solved. Therefore, this study also contributes to the current literature and practice by further examining the intention-behavior relationship with the enhancement of an important domain construct, i.e., perceived accessibility ( Lättman et al, 2016 ).…”