Diverse experiences by active travel for carbon neutrality: A longitudinal study of residential context, daily travel and experience types

Abstract

Two key goals for sustainable spatial planning are to promote low-carbon travel in daily life and to enhance human wellbeing through diverse human-environment interactions. Yet, the integration of these goals has been underexplored. This study investigates the potential for experiential diversity via active travel in different residential contexts within the Gävle city-region, Sweden. Over 15 months, we collected spatiotemporal data from 165 participants, analyzing 4,362 reported experiences and 13,192 GPS-derived travel trajectories. Our analysis uncovered a significant spatial discrepancy: while the travelled distances to locations of positive experiences typically ranged from 1.5 km to 5 km, active travel predominated only within 1.5 km. This discrepancy persisted across urban, suburban, and peripheral contexts. Although residents in different contexts reported the same types of experiences, urban dwellers travelled about 50 % farther for nature experiences compared with other positive experiences, whereas peripheral dwellers travelled twice the distance for urbanicity experiences compared with other positive experiences. Consequently, urban residents mostly relied on active travel for urbanicity experiences and motorised travel for nature experiences, with the reverse trend observed among peripheral dwellers. These results illustrate the importance of spatial scale for promoting diverse positive experiences via active travel, regardless of residential context. Effective planning strategies may include enhancing environmental diversity near homes and developing infrastructure that favours active over motorised travel for short to moderate distances.

Keywords

Walking / Biking / Experiential diversity / GPS data / Smartphone app / Topodiversity

Declaration of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process

While the manuscript was written without the use of AI-assisted technologies, the authors afterwards used ChatGPT 4 for editing purposes to improve its readability. We supplied prompts to only provide suggestions for improved readability without altering the topical content or meaning of the text. During and after the use of this tool, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.

Ethical statement

All participants provided informed consent before registering in the app, in compliance with the study protocols approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (application number 2021–02212).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Karl Samuelsson: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. S. Anders Brandt: . Stephan Barthel: Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Conceptualization. Noah Linder: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Nancy Joy Lim: Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. David Hallman: . Matteo Giusti: Conceptualization, Investigation, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by funding provided by University of Gävle and Vinnova through the GeoLife Region project coordinated by Future Position X [2019–05068]. K.S. was supported by a grant from Forte [2022–00841]. S.B. was supported by a joint grant from Mistra [DIA 2019/28] and Formas via the national research programme on climate [2021–00416] called FAIRTRANS. We acknowledge support from the project Cycle4Climate (Grant No. CB0300173), funded by Interreg Europe's Central Baltic programme, that inspired and enriched this paper.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.05.002.

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