Factors affecting college students’ attitudes toward carpooling

Abstract

As a sustainable mode of travel, carpooling is an effective solution to environmental and energy problems, but carpooling has not been fully utilized. The research on carpooling attitude, especially for college students, still needs to be improved. In response to this problem, this paper aims to investigate the effect of personal attributes, travel attributes, attitude attributes, and other attributes of students on carpooling attitudes in China. To collect the data, an online questionnaire survey was implemented at Shenzhen University, and 514 students participated. Based on the samples, the multinomial logit model is used to explore the contribution of all variables. The model results showed that personal attributes such as gender and age had no significant effect on the attitude of college students toward carpooling. The safety of carpooling and the high cost of carpooling make college students have a neutral attitude towards carpooling. The most concerning factor for college students in carpooling is the comfort of carpooling. These findings can provide valuable suggestions for measures to be taken in response to different attributes affecting students’ attitudes and are particularly important for the university and government to make optimal decisions for motivating students to select carpooling.