Choosing Public Transport and Safety - Young Women in Public Transport, the Perceptionof Safety and its influence on Transport Choice

Abstract

As the world is changing and more attention is being paid to sustainable solutions for the future, pressure rises for people to choose public transport over private cars. To get people to make more use of public transport their behavioural choices need to be investigated. This can be explained using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), adding the influences that habits have on us, to this. In previous research the focus has been on different demographic groups, based on gender or age separately. The combination of a specific gender and age group together with the geographic location, the Netherlands, makes this research interesting. The aim of the research is to find ways to increase young women’s, between the ages of 18 and 30, feeling of safety while using public transport, while also finding behavioural explanations for them to use public transport more often. In the literature there were found five different types of crimes that happen often on public transport, as well as different ways to prevent these types of crimes from happening, with most of these solutions focussing on environmental changes on both public transport vehicles as well as stations and/or stops. This altogether formed the base of a survey targeted at women between the ages of 18 and 30, living in the Netherlands. Through different logit models, an ANOVA test and a Mann-Whitney test it could be concluded that there was no significant influence of a young women’s fear of crime on her behavioural choices surrounding public transport. It was however found that trends regarding car ownership and whether or not someone uses public transport often, is of influence when a young women is asked if she would change her behaviour surrounding public transport to make her feel safer. This shows that having different options influence the behaviour of the young women involved in the research. It should be noted that to get more information on this topic, research from a more psychological point of view should be conducted.