Travel Patterns and Preferences of Urban University Students

Students’ home-university commuting patterns: A shift towards more sustainable modes of transport

“…Many of these findings are also replicated in studies that focused on students. More specifically, long travel times (Danaf et al, 2014;Nguyen-Phuoc et al, 2018;Stein and Silva, 2018), low frequencies (Miralles-Guasch and Domene, 2010;García et al, 2016), unsuitable schedules (Sisiopiku, 2018), insufficient services (Gurrutxaga et al, 2017;Ribeiro et al, 2020b) and high fares (Pérez-Neira et al, 2020;Ribeiro et al, 2020b) are amongst the main barriers preventing students from travelling by public transport to universities.…”

“…Long travel times, long route extensions, no stops closer to the residence, the need to catch more than one bus are amongst the barriers preventing the use of public transport among the community of the University of Minho (Ribeiro et al, 2020a). In fact, there is evidence that the lack of reliable public transport services is one of the main reasons leading students to travel by car to universities (Aoun et al, 2013;Hickman et al, 2018;Sisiopiku, 2018). As confirmed in previous studies (Shannon et al, 2006;Zhou, 2014), a fare policy reform, through discounts and subsidised passes, may also boost the public transport ridership among students.…”

“…Recently, university students' modal choice patterns have been studied more intensively. Private car has been the preferred mode to commute to many universities around the world, such as Qatar University (Azzali and Sabour, 2018), Sydney University, Australia (Rissel et al, 2013), San Diego State University, USA (Appleyard et al, 2018); the University of Michigan-Flint, USA (Rybarczyk and Gallagher, 2014), the University of California, Los Angeles, USA (Zhou, 2016), the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA (Sisiopiku, 2018), the University of Foggia, Italy (Cappelletti et al, 2021), the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain (Miralles-Guasch and Domene, 2010), the University of León, Spain (Pérez-Neira et al, 2020), and the University of A Coruña, Spain (Perez-Lopez et al, 2021), among many others. For this reason, many universities around the world have been classified as major traffic generators (Shannon et al, 2006;Romanowska et al, 2019).…”

Exploring Sustainable Urban Transportation: Insights from Shared Mobility Services and Their Environmental Impact

“…For instance, studies indicate that shorter distances encourage walking and cycling, while longer distances increase the likelihood of using motorized transport [31][32][33]. Inefficiencies in public transport, such as low frequency and long commuting times, often lead to increased car usage [34][35][36].…”