Stockholmarnas resvanor - mellan trängselskatt och klimatdebatt

having a car at all. However, they did not perceive this as a sacrifice but
rather took it for granted as a corollary to the highly prioritised goal of
living in the inner city.
The two other families interviewed lived in the inner suburbs and each
had a member who was a student or on parental leave. These families lived
on household budgets that were partly student budgets. They regarded
their situation as temporary and one family was saving money, including
on current travel, to buy their own apartment or house. This was one factor
controlling their choice of being car-free. Another was good public
transport to the inner city and to work/university from where they lived.
For these families, as for those living in the inner city, the situation of
having small children and parental leave, although temporary, influenced
their transportation choice. Their life was organised around parental leave,
which appeared to comprise a type of slow-down or pause. Such a pause
is not in line with conventional wisdom that families with small children
need a car. What is overlooked is that parental leave provides an opportunity
for delaying car ownership, since it offers a less tight schedule and
flexibility.
Alternatives to travel
Part D) begins by discussing various possibilities for altering everyday life
in a transport-saving direction. The perspective here is professional life,
and in particular options for avoiding work trips by working from an office
hotel near home or by using electronic communication. An analysis of
staff travel showed very varying requirements and reasons for communication
(e-mail, telephone, video conferences, etc.) and work-related travel,
mainly due to the concrete practices involved in execution of professional
duties and roles. Some professional duties involved a certain delineated
and defined product or service being delivered regularly by the member
of staff. In these cases small variations and little uncertainty were found in
the use of trips, meetings and/or communications for doing ones job. This
seemed to offer considerable opportunities for limiting travel and replacing
it with other forms of communications.
Work involving less clearly delineated and defined products or services
were carried out within areas such as product or business development.
This affected how individuals travelled and communicated in order to carry
out their professional duties. Professional duties with a high component of
creativity, information-seeking and/or collaboration can generally be assumed
to give rise to large variations in how trips, meetings and communi-
180 Summary