Developing Sustainable Transportation in National Parks
This project aims to focus on the behavioural component of the transportation problem in the national parks.
Project Background
Transportation-related issues in national parks are a widely recognised problem, especially for national parks situated in densely populated areas, like most parks in the UK. Intensive traffic creates environmental burdens for the local population and ecosystems. In the past decade, in response to the emerging and increasing problems, various programmes have been proposed and developed to address the issue. These include road closure, public transport scheduling and subsidies to bus services, electric bike schemes and dedicated traffic free walking and cycling routes, flexible permit schemes and travel cards, or number-plate recognition technology.
While many of these schemes require changes in infrastructure and investment in new technology, some are easy to implement. However, fundamentally, these efforts will yield results only if visitors are willing to change their behaviour and switch to more sustainable transportation options, even if it causes them minor inconvenience.
Research Questions
- Exploring what attributes influence the choice of transportation among the visitors of the national parks
- Evaluating the effectiveness of gamification interventions developed to facilitate behavioural change
Methods
- Interviews and literature review for background research
- Casual mapping for conceptualisation of the app
- Gamification development process for the app development
- Gamified app for capturing visitor behaviour
- Econometric analysis for analysing visitor attitudes and behaviours
- Casual mapping for conceptualisation of the gamification intervention
- Gamification development process for the development of the gamification intervention
Project Leads/ Supervisors
TBC
Co-investigators/ PhDs/ RAs
- Professor Philip Greening
- Ember McMenemy
- Dr Ganna Borzenkova