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Abstract
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Writing an Editorial for a new journal provides a nice opportunity to express some ideas that normally would tend to lack space to be aired in public. I decided to concentrate on research ideas that I would welcome to see pursued in the near future.
There are three research themes/areas that strongly motivate me nowadays. The first is sustainability, especially at the urban level, given the importance that the issue has finally and deservedly taken following the recent and incontrovertible evidence that the environment (and our planet) is in serious jeopardy unless we, humans, finally do something and fast (IPCC, 2021). In the case of transportation research (our key objective in this journal), this interest calls, first and foremost, for a stronger stand against the indiscriminate use of private cars (IDB, 2021). In this line, I would be extremely interested in seeing more papers dealing with habit and inertia (and policies designed to break these in the case of car users). This should bring - in my view -panel data much more strongly into the forum (Cherchi et al., 2017). Concern for sustainability, also calls for papers dealing with understanding which elements, both of the context and of the individual, might influence using a bicycle for urban trips; this knowledge should translate into the design of policies to encourage stronger use of the bicycle for urban compulsory trips, hopefully replacing the private car in the case of trips of less than, say, 10 km, which is close to the mean trip length in many large metropolises. In my opinion, these two areas of research support much wider use of hybrid choice models incorporating latent variables (Bahamonde-Birke and Ortúzar, 2020)...
Language: en |