Stockholmarnas resvanor - mellan trängselskatt och klimatdebatt

travel habits with new destinations, errands and ways of travel, temporally
and technologically, e.g. to a new shopping centre, exercise on the way
to work or project work from home, and these can be good or bad from
an environmental perspective. Humanists can provide analysis of people’s
conditions and choices. The main and subsidiary motives for actions in a
certain context can be reviewed and more socially beneficial (environmentally
friendly) patterns suggested.
Research contributes to the overarching issues in environmental (sustainability)
drivers of change. Regarding the problems dealt with in this
thesis, it is likely that particular progress can be made in encounters between
researchers and disciplines: Cultural analysts contribute knowledge
on everyday life in terms of cultural patterns, while other researchers formulate
problems and prerequisites. From an environmental perspective,
traffic volumes, emissions and desired change can be calculated on the basis
of a certain target, e.g. the national climate goals. Other researchers consider
the potential for change through economic policies, or via planning
buildings and infrastructure. Yet others consider the potential of technological
development. Collaboration between cultural analysis and other
approaches could tackle e.g. the issue of how travel habits can be changed
through internal and/or external circumstances in people’s lives.
I would like to work further on facilitating such cross-disciplinary
research. Here, I borrowed the travel habit concept from transport economics
and cultural geography and showed that not all trips are habitual (although
regarded as such in some disciplines) and what the habitual aspect
means for people’s attitude to travel. This knowledge must now be transferred
back to disciplines such as transport economics and cultural geography,
so that their analyses can clarify the impact of the habit aspect on
e.g. travel destinations, frequency and duration, or how people in a certain
area will react to a new traffic policy measure.
The challenge is to create a picture of the balance between factors determined
at different levels, e.g. political measures and cultural habits and
values, and their interactions. This will require better interaction between
the disciplines tasked with studying the different levels.
184 Summary