Travel Behavior and Sustainability
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 April 2026 | Viewed by 52
Special Issue Editors
Interests: urban mobility; long-distance mobility; psychographic factors; travel behavior; car dependence; mobility planning
Interests: travel behavior; infrastructure and mobility planning; mobility costs; car usage; autonomous driving; e-mobility; panel and longitudinal studies
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The urgency of addressing climate change and promoting more sustainable development trajectories has brought the role of mobility into sharper focus. As transportation continues to be one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, fostering a transition toward sustainable mobility requires not only technological and infrastructural innovation, but a deep understanding of travel behavior and the underlying psychological, social, and economic factors that shape it. The transition toward sustainable mobility is fundamentally behavioral. While new mobility solutions—such as active travel, shared mobility, and public transport innovations—are increasingly available, their widespread adoption hinges on changes in travel preferences, values, and everyday practices. To design effective policies, interventions, and systems that facilitate behavioral change, scholars must engage with both observable behaviors and the latent psychological processes behind them.
This Special Issue of Sustainability invites original research articles and reviews that deepen our understanding of the relationship between travel behavior and sustainability, with a particular emphasis on the transition toward sustainable mobility. We welcome both empirical and conceptual contributions that use innovative methods and address a range of geographic contexts. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Behavioral change toward more sustainable travel practices;
- Segmentation approaches to identify behavioral, attitudinal, or psychographic travel differences and changes;
- Latent psychological constructs and their influence on travel decision-making;
- Long-distance travel behavior and its sustainability implications;
- Urban mobility studies focused on sustainable transportation modes and behavioral adoption;
- Methodological advances in travel behavior modeling with sustainability implications;
- Implications for changing structures, e.g., mobility costs, from sustainable transport behavior;
- Cross-cultural or comparative studies in travel behavior and sustainability transitions;
- Policy evaluation studies aimed at facilitating sustainable mobility transitions.
Authors are encouraged to consider interdisciplinary perspectives and to integrate behavioral science, planning, data analytics, mobility psychology, and mobility systems thinking in their work.
This Special Issue aims to contribute to the broader discourse on sustainability transitions by highlighting how behaviorally grounded insights can inform both academic understanding and real-world mobility transformation.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Dr. Sascha Von Behren
Prof. Dr. Christine Eisenmann
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- behavioral changes
- long-distance travel behavior
- urban mobility
- sustainable behavior
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