TRAVEL BEHAVIOR RELATED DETERMINANTS OF MENTAL MAP QUALITY: AN
EMPIRICAL STUDY
Caspar Chorus, Harry Timmermans
The study of mental maps has been central to the field of Human Geography and Environmental
Psychology for many years. Recently the specific interrelations between the quality of these
mental maps and travel behavior (people’s choices for travel modes and routes, and their
frequency of travel) have also gained increasing attention in transportation research. This latter
stream of research has provided much supportive evidence, both theoretical and empirical, for the
claim that in order to properly understand peoples’ mental maps, one needs to understand their
travel behavior and vice versa. However, the role of mental maps as a determinant of travel
choice behavior has received more attention than the role of travel choice behavior as a
determinant of mental maps. This difference in attention especially holds for empirical research
and is somewhat surprising in light of the multitude of theoretical suggestions that travel
behavior - be it in the form of, for example, route choice, destination choice, or travel information
acquisition - plays a potentially very important role in helping shape travelers’ mental maps.
This paper aims to contribute to the small body of literature on the impact of travel behavior in
general, and travel mode choice-behavior in specific, on the quality of people’s mental maps.
Firstly, we investigate to what extent travel mode-choice behavior influences the quality and
shape of travelers’ mental maps. Specifically, we investigate whether travelers using ‘passive
modes’ (defined as modes that do not require the traveler to navigate his or her way through the
city themselves, such as transit) develop mental maps of inferior quality compared to those
developed by travelers using ‘more active modes’ such as the car.
As a second contribution, besides an assessment of how socio-demographic factors in
combination with travel (mode-choice) behavior affect the revealed, or objectively measurable,
quality of people’s mental maps, we also study their impact on stated, or perceived, quality of
people’s mental maps. In addition, we relate travelers’ stated evaluation of their mental maps
with their revealed quality. The result is a study that builds on and contributes to recent empirical
literature describing the impact of travel behavior on the quality of people’s mental maps.
A number of results are obtained. For example, our analyses suggest that indeed, travelling by
means of active modes, requiring active navigation of the traveler, leads to higher quality of
mental maps. We find strong effects for both the car and bicycle modes (relative to using the
more passive bus-mode). Furthermore, there appears to be a rather strong correspondence
between stated (or: perceived) and revealed (or: actual) quality of people’s cognitive
constructions of urban space. This correspondence, which can be conceived as a measure of how
well someone is able to assess his or her spatial knowledge, is particularly strong among women
and non-residents of the study area.