View article

This paper identifies three main understandings of the notion of ‘car dependence’ in transport research: a micro-social understanding (dependence as an attribute of individuals), a macro approach (attribute of societies or local areas as whole), and a meso-level understanding, where it refers to trips – or rather to the activities that people travel to undertake. While the first two approaches have been dominant, this paper further develops the third, addressing questions as to whether and why certain activities are inherently more difficult to switch away from the car. At the theoretical level, it builds on theories of social practice to put forward the notion of ‘car dependent practices’. At the empirical level, it demonstrates that the application of sequence pattern mining techniques to time use data allows the identification of car and mobility intensive activities, arguably representing the trace of car dependent practices. Overall …