Social behavioural impacts
This chapter is awaiting its source text
The handbook's Social behavioural impacts chapter currently contains its headings only. No definition, tools, inputs, outputs or references have been supplied for it yet.
Everything on this page is drawn from what the handbook says about the component elsewhere, in the Introduction and in Figure 2. It is here so the component is not a blank in the sidebar, and it will be replaced when the chapter's own text arrives.
What the component represents
Social behavioural impacts represent changes in people's travel and activity behaviour in response to weather and hazard conditions.
These changes can modify transport demand. People reduce, reschedule or avoid trips during hazardous conditions such as heatwaves or flooding. In the case of a heatwave, for instance, people may decide to stay at home rather than doing leisure activities on the streets.
Why it is modelled separately
The component exists because behaviour changes demand before the hazard physically touches the network.
If a heatwave keeps people indoors, fewer travellers are exposed to it in the first place. A model that ignored this would put the normal weekday population onto the network, then apply the hazard to all of them, and overstate the disruption as a result.
Modelling the behavioural response separately keeps the exposed population honest.
The order of operations
- A weather event is defined and its hazard modelled.
- Social behavioural impacts adjust who travels, and when.
- The adjusted demand is simulated on the network.
- The hazard is intersected with that simulation.
Step 2 is this component. Skipping it does not just lose detail, it biases the result.
Where it sits in the framework
The component connects the weather side of the framework to the transport side.
In the conceptual framework (Figure 1), Social Behaviour Impacts sits alongside the Transport Scenario, feeding into it rather than standing between the hazard and the network.
In the components diagram (Figure 2), the flow is more specific. The weather event feeds a Social Behavioural Impacts box, whose contents are labelled weather impacts on trip decisions. That box then feeds Activity Plans assignment inside the Transport Demand block.
| Receives from | Passes to |
|---|---|
| The weather event, via climate scenarios and hazard models | Activity plans, within transport demand |
Related reading
Until this chapter's own text is supplied, the fullest descriptions of the component are in the Introduction:
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Transport scenario | Behaviour as the third ingredient alongside demand and supply |
| IMP components | The component's one-paragraph definition |