Life Events, Built Environment, and Active Travel: Temporal Relationships over the Life Course in the Netherlands

It is widely accepted that active travel has many health, environmental, economic, and social benefits. However, the shift from active travel to motorized travel has occurred rapidly worldwide. To promote active travel participation, lots of scholars have investigated influences on active travel participation, yet how life events and built environment factors influence active travel over time is still unclear. To address this gap and provide causal and dynamic evidence, this study used a 5-year longitudinal dataset from the Netherlands Mobility Panel (MPN) and a dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) approach, to explore the temporal relationships between life events, built environment factors and active travel frequency, including frequency of conventional bike use, frequency of e-bike use, and frequency of walking. Results show that life events play a much more important role in the probability of active travel frequency than built environment factors. Besides, owning an e-bike is found to have the biggest impact on the probability of frequent bike use. It impedes the frequent conventional bike use, whereas it increases the frequent e-bike use. In addition, the life event childbirth has different temporal effects on the probability of three types of active travel frequencies. Moreover, changing to another work address is observed to have negative lagged effects and concurrent effects on the probability of frequent e-bike use. These findings provide empirical evidence to promote active travel participation in urban planning and policymaking in the context of the Netherlands.