Switching toward sustainable commuting among university students: determinants, modes and institutional actions

As universities increasingly integrate sustainability into institutional strategy, student commuting remains a critical but underexamined interface between environmental performance and student participation. This paper investigates sustainable commuting at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Unimore), a multi-campus public university in Northern Italy, where daily travel is the constitutive condition of participation for most students. Using self-reported online survey data collected in May 2023 from 25,190 students (94% of total enrolment), the study examines how structural constraints and institutional attendance schedules shape commuting mode choice and how students’ requested interventions can be translated into institutional leverage strategies. The analysis combines multinomial logistic modelling, correspondence analysis, and Total Interpretive Structural Modelling. Results show the primacy of structural opportunity conditions: distance is the dominant correlate of mode choice, indicating that sustainable mobility is largely a matter of feasibility rather than preference. Weekly on-campus attendance also significantly affects mode choice, highlighting the organisation of learning as an education-specific demand driver. Intervention requests vary systematically across commuter groups, supporting a segment-based strategy built around public transport performance, university-controlled actions, and incentive architectures. Therefore, this work conceptualises student commuting as a bounded pro-environmental practice and proposes a coherent determinants-modes-levers framework for higher education sustainability governance.