Garrison, Mackenzie; (Utah State University)
Faculty Advisor: Graul, Antje (Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Marketing and Strategy Department); Thompson, Greg (Brigham Young University, Anthropology)
The means of transportation is forever changing and just recently multiple means of electric transport have emerged in our cities. People are taking full advantage of all means of transportation but the framework for decision making has not adapted to include all means of transport. Current frameworks are largely utilitarian based and do not account for a large portion of travel mode choice behaviors. The goal for this project was to identify alternate decision frameworks for understanding and modeling consumers' personal travel mode choices and determine the appropriateness of a non-compensatory Maslow-like framework for explaining consumers decision making processes for travel mode choice. To complete this goal, we followed two objectives:
1) Qualitatively determine the structure and contents of consumers' pre-consumption perceived satisfaction of needs for understanding the personal transportation mode choice decision-making process and consumers' intention to engage into a particular mode of transport from a consumer behavior perspective, and
2) Quantitatively validate the proposed framework by taking both pre-consumption perceptions and post-consumption evaluations into consideration.
To collect data, we used two means of research: conducting focus groups and collecting surveys. This allowed us to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. From this data we concluded that travel mode decisions are influenced by a number of factors ranging from convenience to environmental concern. Depending on the type of transportation, some factors were considered more than others. Some factors included health when bicycling, traffic when driving an independent vehicle, and relationship building with bicycle and scooter share. As we predicted, there are many factors, both utilitarian and non-utilitarian, that drive transportation decision making.