The Belfast city region: travel behaviour, its impact on sustainability arising from the suburbanisation of dormitory settlements

This thesis offers a contribution to knowledge by addressing the issue of suburbanisation and its impact on sustainability through household travel behaviour. It compares settlement classes within a principal commuter corridor of the Belfast City Region. The study seeks to highlight and explore factors appropriate to testing the hypothesis that current trends in suburbanisation are inconsistent with the values underpinning sustainable development, while people in selecting their location fail to reconcile their lifestyle and travel patterns with sustainability. Testing the belief that new residential developments are meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations is comprehensively beyond the scope of this thesis. However, using an application of multi-attribute utility theory, the thesis shows how it is possible to derive a household's index of travel-behaviour sustainability and so facilitates cross settlement comparisons. The robustness of the application, which embraces expert opinions and household survey data, is confirmed using conventional sensitivity analysis. It shows that the consensus of expert knowledge would need to change quite radically to influence the relative impact of the derived indices. Although the focus of research is on travel behaviour, the model could readily be applied in other sustainability situations. It is anticipated that the outcomes, although based on a single commuter corridor, will provide others with an opportunity to consider the wider application of the methodology and that, in particular, the results will inform debate on policy considerations as they relate to greenfield versus brownfield site development. Chapter one introduces the study and chapters two through eight inform and refine the modelling process through an extensive literature review and the selection of a decision-making paradigm. Statistical techniques used in the analysis are explained in chapter nine followed by research results in chapters ten through twelve. Conclusions and developments are discussed in chapter thirteen.