Transportation and Climate Behaviors: Comparing Difficulty of Transportation-related Behaviors Across Different Populations

Understanding people’s environmental behaviors is essential to combating climate change. However, certain behaviors are harder for some people while being easier for others. As such, it is essential to identify the difficulty level of various behaviors for better targeting policies and interventions. Therefore, the objective of this study is to first determine the difficulty of environmental behaviors with consideration given to their GHG reduction and, second, to identify the difficulty of such behaviors across different segments of the population, focusing on the difficulty of transportation-related behaviors. A large-scale survey was conducted, and the Rasch model was used for modeling. The results suggested that low-impact and medium-impact behaviors were much easier for Canadians to adopt than high-impact behaviors. Transportation-related behaviors were generally among the hardest actions for the population. Among these, using a plug-in hybrid car was the simplest, while living vehicle-free was the most difficult.