Eliciting citizens’ priorities for active travel infrastructure investments: A qualitative analysis of best-worst scaling experiments

Albahlal, F., Haggar, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8753-1848 and Potoglou, D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3060-7674 2024. Eliciting citizens’ priorities for active travel infrastructure investments: A qualitative analysis of best-worst scaling experiments. Journal of Transport and Health 36 , 101795. 10.1016/j.jth.2024.101795

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Abstract

Introduction: The built environment plays an important role in individuals’ propensity to walk and cycle and local authorities increasingly invest financial resources towards its development. Organisations responsible for the built environment have developed auditing tools as guidelines to inspect routes and identify improvements to support active travel. Methods: Using these auditing tools as a starting point, this study developed 21 walking and 25 cycling investment-relevant factors that were embedded into two choice-based survey instruments, respectively. The study used cognitive interview pre-testing to internally validate a preference-based elicitation approach known as Best-Worst Scaling (BWS), which aimed to capture pedestrian and cyclist preferences. We report findings from cognitive interviews (data analysed thematically) with 20 participants (10 pedestrians and 10 cyclists). Results: In both sets of interviews, four themes emerged regarding how the participants approached the BWS task and five themes related to the understanding of the factors. The BWS choice tasks required refinement regarding the ‘frame of reference’, ‘travel context’, the ‘decision-making strategy’, and the ‘concrete thinking’ (finding some factors easier to interpret). Additionally, issues with understanding the factors, the wording, ‘overlapping’, negatively phrased factors, and technical jargon all pointed towards the need to refine auditing tools if these were to be introduced in a preference elicitation context. Conclusions: This study helps to empirically uncover how citizens interpret infrastructure related aspects of walking and cycling by pointing to nuanced aspects that auditing tools may miss. The findings also helped develop an internally consistent preference elicitation survey-instrument that any local authority can implement to determine which walking and cycling infrastructure investments are a priority in their area.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	2214-1405
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 March 2024
Date of Acceptance:	8 March 2024
Last Modified:	23 Oct 2024 13:55
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/167117

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