Exploring the Relationship between Undergraduate Education andSustainable Transport Attitudes
Junghwa Kima, Jan-Dirk Schmöckerb*, Satoshi Fujiic
a,b, cDepartment of Urban Management, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japanakim@trans.kuciv.kyoto-u.co.jpbschmoecker@trans.kuciv.kyoto-u.co.jp
cfujii@trans.kuciv.kyoto-u.co.jp

Abstract: The objective of this study is to discuss the impact of education and environmental
attitudes on the support for sustainable transport policies among civil engineering students.
We surveyed a total of 524 students from Kyoto University, Japan; asking them about the
number of environment related modules they have taken, about their attitudes towards
environmental issues as well as their attitudes towards various transport policies. We firstly
demonstrate that there is a positive relationship between course selection and environmental
concern and discuss self selection issues by comparing civil engineering students withstudents from other faculties. We then use a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to derive that
education and environmental concern also positively influence attitudes to transportation
policies aimed at reducing car usage. We conclude that raising awareness of environmental
problems and promoting responsibility through the university curriculum is important toeducate future transport decision makers as well as to gain general support for sustainabletransportation policies.
Keywords: University Education; Sustainable Transport, Transport Policy, Environmental
Attitudes, Environmental Concern

1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Sustainable Transport and University Education
A large number of professionals involved in transport planning graduate fromengineering departments. Academics as well as professionals alike have understood thatengineering, and in particular civil engineering, must undergo major changes. Not only domajor universities change the name of civil engineering departments but also professional
bodies redefine the tasks of civil engineering. In the year 2007, the American Society of Civil
Engineers (ASCE) for example published their “Vision for Civil Engineering 2025” as astatement that describes a new role for the profession, “a bright, ambitious goal that would
guide civil engineers around the globe to a new level of leadership and professionalism”.
They describe future civil engineers as “master planners, designers, and constructors; leadstewards of the natural environment; master innovators and integrators; managers of risk; andleaders in shaping public policy.”

If this is true for Civil Engineering in general it is in particular true for students focusing
on urban and transport planning. Planners have more influence on the relationship between
nature, humans and the build environment than those being in charge of managing andmaintaining infrastructure. In particular in transport planning the close relationship betweenchanges in the infrastructure, human behavior and environmental impacts has been studied.
This journal as well as a large number of contributions in other transport journals is devoted
to the topic of “sustainable transport”. Impacts of “micro-changes” such as changing speed
limits on emissions have been studied as well as increasingly attempts are made to model
short- and long term impacts of “macro-changes” such as the road network layout. Further,
the inseparable relationship between transport and land-use is well known. This means,
especially planning students will need to gain a wider understanding regarding the complexityof our environmental system.
“Understanding” of the issues alone is not enough though. Few graduates of planningcourses would probably deny that they are aware of the environmental problems caused bytraffic. In order to become “lead stewards of the natural environment” students will need to beconvinced of the importance of the issues at stake as well as be able to voice their opinion
effectively. Ideally education should prepare future decision makers to take a position for thecommon good in various “dilemma situations”. Newhouse (1990) writes “Ultimately, people
need to be able to make their own moral decisions about environmental matters. The job ofeducators is to ensure that everyone has all the tools necessary to make responsible
environmental decisions.” Similarly, Hyde and Karney (2001) conclude that engineering
education should not only consider “understanding” but also whether students “care” for theenvironment.

1.2 Literature on Education and Environmental Attitudes
This firstly leads to the question in how far universities can deliver such an education
and, more fundamentally, if education can influence environmental problem perceptions andin the long actually change students’ attitudes. This appears to have been not much studied
specifically for transport planning education. There is though evidence for the impact of
university education in more general on students’ attitudes, in particular on the impact of
economic education. For example Frank et al (1993) study the difference between students
majoring in economics and those from other disciplines. They find not only that economic
students are less co-operative but also provide some evidence that the difference to students
majoring in other subjects increases with length of education. Also Marwell and James (1981)
find differences in the co-operative behavior of economic students, whether this is due to theireducation is though not clear. Hess-Quimbita et al (1996) report evidence that scienceeducation appears to help the development of environmental concern. Using a sample of
18,887 students, they demonstrate that human ethical/social values as well as the number ofscience modules play important roles in the development of environment concern. Therefore
students’ academic and social integration appears to indirectly influence the development ofenvironmental-friendly attitudes. Similarly, Smith-Sebasto (1995) reports changes in students’
perceived environmental responsibility through education. He noted that students completingan environmental studies course showed significantly higher environmental responsibility.
In summary, there is some limited literature suggesting that “environmental
consciousness” could, at least to some degree, be taught. This motivated the study that let tothis paper. We would like to understand whether course selection and education can play animportant role for students to obtain attitudes that encourage them to promote sustainabletransport policies in their later working life. In order to derive some firm conclusions on this,
one needs to obtain good panel data that illustrate a change in attitudes for the target group, inthis case engineering students that take specific classes, versus other students with the samebackground that do not take these classes. Due to difficulties in obtaining such panel data, we
focus this paper on an exploration of cross-sectional data regarding environmental andtransport policy attitudes of those who choose courses with a focus on environment versus
those who choose to study different subjects. As our subsequent analysis will show we believe
this is a first important step to understand what curriculum engineering students that will be
involved in transport planning should be taught.

2. DATA
2.1. Environmental Education at Kyoto University
Our analysis is based on a survey among students at Kyoto University. At thisuniversity transport planning education is part of the “School of Global Engineering” atundergraduate level which combines varies Civil Engineering related subjects into thecurriculum. We survey undergraduate students from different faculties regarding theirenvironmental attitudes in general and their attitudes towards sustainable transport policies in
specific. As a proxy for the amount of environmental education received we consider how
many modules with the term “environment” included in the module title the student has taken.
Figure 1 shows the number of environmental classes offered among faculties at Kyoto
University and departments in the engineering faculty. The faculty of agriculture has the mostmodules related to environment (31) and the faculty of engineering ranks number two with 15
modules that include the term environment. Within the faculty of engineering, the departmentof global engineering, which includes transport and urban planning, offers seven“environment modules” and therefore the most compared to other departments (Figure 1). The
content of these non-mandatory courses are described in Table 1. In addition to these courses
first year students have the chance to take a small group seminar over one semester on a topic
of their interest. Several of these so-called “pocket seminars” also focus on environmental
issues and we have hence also included these into our count of how many environmental
courses a student has taken.

As the classes are non-mandatory the problem of a possible self-selection bias is
obvious. We cannot disentangle the effect of interest in environmental issues prior to taking
the course from the education effect. What we can still observe though is the change inattitudes towards environmental and transport policy issues due to this (combined) effectamong students from different grades. Our focus is therefore on undergraduate students, for
two main reasons. Firstly, this is a four year course over which the impact of education might
be more evident than for the two year Master degree programs. Secondly, for undergraduate
students we assume it is reasonable to presume not much prior knowledge and specificinterest in transport policy issues. This is likely to be different for Master students who will
choose specific transport planning related courses.

Figure 1. Number of modules with a title including “Environment”
in Kyoto University (Faculty of Engineering)
Table 1. Modules with a title including “Environment” in Global engineering (Civil Eng)
Name of module(Grade in which students
take the course)
Atmospheric and Env.
Engineering (3rd)Basic Environmental
Engineering I (2nd)Coastal Environmental
Engineering(3rd)
Environmental Equipment
Engineering(3rd)
Environmental Hygiene(2nd)Contents
Global warming, ozone layer depletion, and acid rain problems are introduced.
Further air pollution and its health effects are discussed.
This class deals with waste water and sewage management. Moreover, theconservation of the water environment, environmental risk management, and thepromotion of a recycling-based society are introduced.
Beach transformation, sediment transport, coastal streams, ocean waves andirregular waves such as tsunamis are discussed. In addition, the relationshipbetween coastal ecosystems, engineering ethics and social issues are discussed.
The principles of tools that help purifying the environment are described.
Lectures focus on transport material balance, filtration and sedimentation ofparticulate matter, waste drying and absorption of gas.
The lectures introduce the relationship between hygiene and environmental
issues including a discussion on public hygiene.

Geotechnical andEnvironmental
Engineering(3rd)
Basic Environmental
Engineering II(3rd)

In the environmental engineering part of this lecture series, recycling groundenvironment and groundwater, soil and groundwater pollution, and waste
disposal are described.
Pollution mechanisms of soil and groundwater are taught as well as case studiesof purification technology applications.

2.2. Respondents
Table 2 lists the surveys that have been undertaken from March to July 2012. All
surveys have been conducted during the last 15 minutes of lectures. Table 2 presents thecorresponding descriptive statistics of the sample. Students from all grades in civilengineering answered our survey, as well 1st grade chemical engineering students and thirdyear students majoring in the economy faculty. A total of 524 observations were gathered forthis study. The average age of respondents is 19.9 years and the proportion of males in thesample is 88%, which is fairly representative of the gender split within the engineeringschool.
We survey also first year chemical engineering students to understand the effect ofprior interest in civil engineering issues on attitudes. We chose chemical engineering partly
because we could obtain agreement for surveying in these classes and partly because webelieve these students can be a valid control group representing other engineering students
with less interest in transport and urban issues.

We further survey 3rd year economics

students because they take a subject “Transport Economy”. Therefore we can assume thatthey will also have some knowledge about transport planning, though from a different
viewpoint and we hypothesise that there might be differences in environmental interest
between these two groups in line with above literature.

The selection of the lectures in which we surveyed was not influenced by the topic of
the module; we rather chose lectures attended by large student numbers in order to catch the
majority of students in each grade during a single survey. The surveys were administered to
students in paper form at the end of classes after previously obtaining the agreement of therespective lecturers in charge of the class. We explained that this is a survey to understand
students’ interest in environmental and transport policy issues and that it is purely for research
purposes. Students’ were not provided any incentives and the surveys were collected uponcompletion which took on average 10 minutes.

We ask students about their socio-demographics as well as which modules they havetaken so far. Students in their first and second year had so far, on average, taken less than one
module directly related to environment issues, which would mostly be the aforementioned“pocket seminars”. In contrast students in the 3rd and 4th grades of global engineering took on
average 4.4 environmental modules. This is because the majority of the modules are taught inthe second semester of the 2nd as well as throughout the 3rd grade (see Table 1). We note that
we could not survey 4th year students separately since at Kyoto University there are no
dedicated classes for 4th year students. Instead final year students complete some remainingclasses together with 3rd year students if they have not yet collected sufficient credits andotherwise focus on their final year project.

Table 2. Descriptive statistic of data
Global (Civil) engineering

Chemicalengineering

EconomyTotal

1 year

2 year

3rd ,4th
year

138

137

97

101

51

524

0.52

0.93

4.43

0.04

0.65

1.31

Age (mean)

18.7

19.6

20.9

18.7

21.5

19.9

Gender(% of male)

90.6

93.4

87.6

90.1

78.4

88.0

st

Sample size

nd

st

rd

th

1 year

3 ,4 year

Environmental classes
taken (mean)

3. EDUCATION AND ATTITUDES

3.1 Environmental Concern
In the survey we asked questions measuring the environmental concern of students aslisted in Table 3. We distinguish problem awareness from ascribed responsibility as well as
personal, self and social dimensions of environmental issues. This set up of questions is basedon a large set of literature emanating from environmental psychology. Among others Gärling
et al. (2008) report that self problem awareness is an important factor when discussing roaduser charging acceptance in Sweden. Self problem awareness relates to the awareness that“my own behavior is part of the problem” as discussed for example by Choocharukuland andFujii (2007).

Personal problem awareness instead describes whether a person perceives the
problem to be significantly related not just to the general public but to him/her personally(Gärling et al., 2008). The questions for awareness were taken from Schmöcker et al. (2012)
and Kim et al (2013). Gärling et al. (2003) noted that awareness of consequences must induce
an ascribed responsibility to perform the behavior that in turn activates a moral obligation to
perform the behavior. In this study therefore two questions were taken from Gärling et al.
(2003) to measure personal and social aspects of ascribed responsibility. All questions wereasked on a 7 point Likert scale. Ratings were obtained with verbally defined endpoints andmidpoints (“Totally disagree” – “Neutral” –“Fully agree”).
Table 3. Survey questions regarding environmental concern
Self Problem AwarenessDo you think the CO2 that you produce in your daily life will contributeto climate change and this will negatively influence society?

Personal Problem AwarenessDo you think global warming will serious damage yourself?

Personal Ascribed Responsibility

I am not concerned about the environment (-)

Social Ascribed Responsibility

Every citizen must take responsibility for the environment

3.2 Comparative Analysis
We hypothesize that environmental education has a significant impact on generalenvironmental problem awareness and ascribed environmental responsibility. We firstcompare 1st year engineering students with those majoring in chemical engineering. Our
objective is to understand whether there might be some differences due to environmental
interests between the two groups. In other words, differences in environmental attitudes might
not be due to education but rather due to attitudinal differences obtained before entering
university which might have influenced their choice of subject.

We compared the values of environmental concern between the two groups as shownin Table 4. We find no significant differences in problem awareness. However, the results

show that students who major in civil engineering seem more concerned about theenvironment as they score higher on personal responsibility. We further compare civilengineering students in upper grades with those majoring in economy. As shown in Table 5,
there are large differences in the environmental education received. The results from thecomparative analysis indicate that engineering students show higher environmental problem
awareness than students with an economy major. This might suggest an education effect but toseparate also here the effect of “interest” from “education” or “age” further data collection
will be required.

To separate the effect of prior interest from education and age effects, we compare
global engineering students in their 2nd and 3rd grades. These two groups differ significantly inthe number of environmental classes taken (0.93 vs 4.43 as shown in Table 6) as discussed
before. Assuming that the one to two year age difference in itself has no impact onenvironmental problem awareness, we therefore suggest that the results from this comparison
can be considered as impact of education. We note though that we cannot distinguish fromthis table whether the difference is due to the environmental lectures or the general education
received. In line with above results in Table 5, it is indicated that self and personal problem
awareness are higher among the more senior students. This suggests that environmental
concern can be increased by (environmental) education.

Table 4.Comparsion of 1st year civil and chemical eng. students
Civil Eng
Determinantsst

Chemical Engst

1 students

1 students

Mean (Std. Dev.)

Mean (Std. Dev.)

0.51 (1.41)

0.04 (0.20)

Self Problem Awareness4.75 (1.62)

4.69 (1.77)

0.27 (0.79)

Personal Problem Awareness4.88 (1.67)

4.87 (1.70)

0.03 (0.98)

Personal Ascribed Responsibility

5.62 (1.32)

5.05 (1.62)

3.01** (0.003)

Social Ascribed Responsibility

5.31 (1.37)

5.13 (1.36)

1.02 (0.31)

t-test (p-values)

Environmental Education(average number of taken classes
related to environment)

Significance level: *** 0.01, **0.05, *0.1

Table 5. Comparison of 3rd + 4th year civil eng. and economy students
Civil Engrd

DeterminantsthEconomyrdth

3 , 4 students

3 , 4 students

Mean (Std. Dev.)

Mean (Std. Dev.)

4.43(1.23)

0.65(0.56)

Self Problem Awareness5.18(1.50)

4.39(1.47)

0.91*** (0.003)

Personal Problem Awareness5.03(1.58)

4.49(1.45)

0.87** (0.04)

Personal Ascribed Responsibility

5.48(1.56)

5.33(1.49)

0.57 (0.57)

Social Ascribed Responsibility5.32(1.43)

5.14(1.40)

0.74 (0.46)

t-test (p-values)

Environmental Education(average number of taken classes
related to environment)

Significance level: *** 0.01, **0.05, *0.1

Table 6.Comparison of 2nd and 3rd+4th year civil eng. students
Civil EngndDeterminants

2 year students
Mean (Std. Dev.)

Civil Engrdth

3 and 4 year
students
Mean (Std. Dev.)

t-test (p-values)

Education(average number of classes taken by the0.93(0.43)

4.43(1.23)

Self Problem Awareness4.61(1.52)

5.18(1.50)-2.85*** (0.01)

Personal Problem Awareness4.63(1.56)

5.03(1.58)-1.94* (0.05)

Personal Ascribed Responsibility

5.42(1.53)

5.48(1.56)-0.30 (0.77)

Social Ascribed Responsibility

5.24(1.48)

5.32(1.43)-0.41 (0.68)

student related to environment)

Significance level: *** 0.01, **0.05, *0.1

4. EDUCATION AND TRANSPORT POLICY

4.1 Environmental Concern and Transport Policy
There is a large body of literature showing that acceptability and acceptance1 oftransportation policy, depends on people`s environmental concern for climate change or
global warming. In particular Schade and Schlag (2000) demonstrated that the acceptability ofroad pricing is dependent on people`s problem awareness. Similarly, Steg (2003) argues thatpeople who are more aware of the environmental problems caused by car usage are also more
likely to perceive needs for policies to solve these and are therefore more likely to accept
environmental friendly policies. Eriksson et al. (2006, 2008) consider personal norms such as
moral motivation to reduce environmental problems and the relation toward acceptability oftravel demand management measures. They discuss that personal norms influence acceptancethrough willingness to act indirectly, and also show that there is a direct correlation among
various types of travel demand measures. Moreover, Nilsson and Kuller (2000) verified thatenvironmental attitudes and knowledge are strongly related to the acceptance of various
traffic restrictions for private cars such as road toll, petrol tax and no parking areas.

4.2 Attitudes to Environmental Friendly Policies
Above literature shows evidence that environmental concern influences acceptance oftransportation policy. We further showed in previous section that education appears to
influence environmental concern. Therefore we hypothesize that education is also related toattitudes of environmental and transportation policies, mediated by environmental concern. To
demonstrate this, we measured the attitudes towards various policies aimed at restraining car
usage.

In total four questions are asked as examples for environmental friendly transport policy(Table 7). The first question is chosen to measure support for the promotion of public
transport. In Kyoto, the subway network is limited but there is an extensive bus network that1

The term ‘acceptability’ should be used for hypothetical or not yet implemented schemes whereas for
implemented schemes the term ‘acceptance’ is commonly used (see Gärling et al, 2008, Schuitema et al, 2010).

is frequently used by students. For example the main campus of Kyoto University isaccessible by several bus lines but not by subway. The second question aims to understandsupport for parking restrictions and we ask about attitudes towards parking charges in the
CBD of Kyoto. There exist several parking houses as well as small capacity parking lots inCentral Kyoto which all charge usually around 500 Japanese yen (around 5 US$) per hour.
With the third question we ask students for the support of periodic car inspections to reduce
CO2 emissions. In Japan currently there is a regulation that cars older than ten years must
undergo an inspection every 2 years. Finally, expressway pricing is included as a typical TDM
policy, because all students will be familiar with this as almost all expressways in Japan aretolled.

Since three of these policies can also be promoted for congestion reduction reasons, we
include awareness about congestion problems as an additional control variable in our model.
To measure congestion problem awareness, following question was asked: “Do you think thecongestion level in Kyoto city is serious?” (mean: 5.17, std. dev.: 1.29). In the same way as
for the questions for environmental concern, all questions were asked on a 7 point Likert scale.
Also here all ratings were obtained with verbally defined endpoints and midpoints (“Totallydisagree” – “Neutral” –“Fully agree”). The transport policy questions were only posed to civilengineering students so that the analysis described subsequently is limited to this group (N =372).
Table 7. Questions regarding attitudes towards Environmental Transport Policies
Transport Policy

Question

Mean(Std. Dev.)

Public Transport

Do you feel that all citizens should use public transport in Kyoto?

4.67 (1.63)

Parking Charges

Do you support parking charge systems like a pay garage in the
CBD or near the train station?

5.14 (1.63)

Eco Inspection

Do you support the law of eco-inspection of cars once in 2 years?

5.15 (1.48)

Expressway
Pricing

Do you support to pay some fees for using highway?

4.95 (1.45)

4.3 Model Estimation
We estimate Structural Equation Models (SEM) to verify the impact of education ontransportation policies using the AMOS 21 software. The structural equations are meant torepresent casual relationships among the variables in the model. The least-squares method isused for model estimation which is a general method for the analysis of SEM with latent
exogenous and endogenous variables. The equations of our hypothesized model are describedas follows and shown in Figure 2 where endogenous variables are shown as η and exogenous
variable as ξ; β and γ are the estimated coefficients of the endogenous and exogenous
variables respectively (Fox, 2006). The model estimation results are reported in Table 8, alongwith t-values.

Environmental problem awareness and Ascribed responsibility are both constructedby two indicators each. Self awareness and Personal awareness are grouped as Environmental
problem awareness with high Cronbach’s alpha of 0.75. Ascribed responsibility includes thetwo indicators Personal and Social responsibility. For this construct the reliability is not ashigh (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.55) but we believe it is still acceptable for this model in which weestimate the the weight for 3 and 4.
On the right are the attitudes to the four transport policies. We only allow for paths

from left to right. We hypothesise that environmental education is a more distal factor thanenvironmental problem awareness and estimate a model embedding the hypothesis of a direct
path from Environmental problem awareness to Ascribed responsibility as in Gärling et al.
(2003). Environmental problem awareness in turn was hypothesised to influence both
Ascribed responsibility and Congestion problem awareness which are considered as direct
determinants of the policy attitudes.

The estimated model confirms that, as hypothesized, environmental education isindirectly associated with attitudes to transport policies through Environmental problem
awareness and Ascribed responsibility. We do not find a significant path from Environmental
problem awareness to Congestion problem awareness so that the latter appears to be a
separate variable influencing attitudes towards transport policies.

The final model only

includes paths that are found significant at least at the 10% level. The overall goodness of fitof the model appears to be acceptable with GFI2 = 0.97, Adj GFI = 0.95, RMSEA3 = 0.05,
2

GFI (Goodness-of-Fit-Index): GFI varies from 0 to 1, but theoretically can yield meaningless negativevalues. By convention, GFI should be approximately 0.90 or more to accept the model. By this criterion, thepresent model is accepted.
3
RMSEA (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation): There is adequate fit model if RMSEA is less than orand CFI4 = 0.94.

Figure 2. Estimated SEM (Civil Engineering Students Only, N=372)

Considering the path coefficients in Table 8 and total effects in Table 9, following
observations appear important to us: Firstly, we find a significant path between education(number of environmental classes attended) and environmental problem awareness. This isequivalent to our results in Section 3 and suggests that (environmental) education influences
environmental problem awareness. Moreover, Figure 2 shows that Awareness has a significant
effect on ascribed responsibility and responsibility positively influences attitudes towards thetransportation policies except for “Expressway Pricing”. Finally, we find that congestion
problem awareness influences all four policy types. We only hypothesised this link for threeof the policies but also found a significant path to eco inspection.

When we compare the effects of ascribed environmental responsibility on policy
attitudes, the explanatory power for public transportation support is higher than for the
support of eco inspection and parking charges. Furthermore, the β coefficients for the latter
two policies are only significant at the 10% level. A significant effect of ascribed

equal to 0.08.
4Comparative Fit Index (CFI) : In examining baseline comparisons, the CFI depends in large part on the
average size of the correlations in the data. If the average correlation between variables is not high, then the
CFI will not be very high. A CFI value of 0.90 or higher is desirable. (Kline, 1998)

responsibility on expressway pricing could not be established. Congestion problem awarenesshas a strong correlation with the support of parking restrictions. Support for public transport
focused policies and road pricing policies are also significantly correlated with congestion
problem awareness, but there is a relatively weak correlation with environmental transport
policies.

The results are further illustrated by the description of the total effects in Table 9.
Education, via problem awareness and ascribed responsibility, primarily increases the support
for public transport; the effects on support for eco inspection and parking policy are weaker.
These three policies are positively determined by ascribed responsibility as well as congestion
problem awareness whereas acceptance of road pricing is influenced by only congestion
problem awareness. Both predictors explain 21% of the variance in support for the public
transport policy, 40% of parking policy acceptance variance but only 9% of eco inspection
acceptance variance. The low value for eco-inspection might be due to many students nothaving a strong opinion on this issue. As mentioned before, only older cars require currently
an inspection and most of the students are not car owners. In how far the results described inthis section are influenced further by Kyoto and Japan specific experiences of the respondents
should be explored though in further research.

Table 8. The results of the estimated model
Estimated
un-standardized
coefficients

S.E

t-value

Estimated
standardized
coefficients

Environmental Education → Environmental Problem
Awareness

5.81*

3.14

1.85

1.00

β2

Environmental Problem Awareness → Ascribed
Responsibility

0.61**

0.07

8.64

1.00

β3

Ascribed Responsibility → Attitudes to Public
Transportation

0.35**

0.13

2.77

0.36

β4

Ascribed Responsibility → Attitudes to Parking System

0.20*

0.11

1.81

0.16

β5

Ascribed Responsibility → Attitudes to Eco Inspection

0.21*

0.11

1.86

0.36

β6

Congestion Problem Awareness →Attitudes to Public
Transportation

2.04**

0.71

2.85

0.93

β7

Congestion Problem Awareness →Attitudes to Parking
System

2.74**

0.96

2.85

0.99

β8

Congestion Problem Awareness →Attitudes to Eco
Inspection

1.25**

0.49

2.54

0.93

β9

Congestion Problem Awareness →Attitudes to Road
Pricing

1.69**

0.60

2.80

1.00

Link

Variable

β1

Environmental Problem Awareness (Cronbach`s alpha =0.75)γ1(Self Problem Awareness)

1.000

γ2

(Personal Problem Awareness)

0.97**

0.09

-

0.77

11.19

0.76

-

0.52

7.65

0.58

Ascribed Responsibility (Cronbach`s alpha =0.55)
γ3(Personal Responsibility)

1.000

γ4

(Social Responsibility)

1.08**

0.14*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05

Table 9. Total effects on transport policies
Attitudes toTransport Policy

Congestion
Problem
Awareness(direct effect)

Education(indirect effect)

Environmental
Problem
Awareness(indirect effect)

Ascribed
Responsibility(direct effect)

Attitudes to
Public Transportation

2.04**

1.25**

0.22**

0.35**

Attitudes to
Parking System

2.74**

0.72*

0.12*

0.20*

Attitudes to
Eco Inspection

1.25**

0.76**

0.13**

0.21**

Attitudes toRoad Pricing

1.69**---*p < 0.10, **p < 0.05

5. CONCLUSION
Sustainable transport is not achievable without planners who fully embrace suchpolicies. Planners are “created” at universities through appropriate education. Many major
universities are nowadays rethinking therefore their engineering curriculum to a) address amore global audience and b) to respond to changing needs towards more sustainable transport
policies. Environmental education is in many institutions seen to be of primary importancethough evidence on the impact of education has been largely missing so far. The aim of thisstudy is to be a first step to close this knowledge gap.

With a survey among Kyoto University undergraduate students, we show that alreadyfirst year civil engineering students perceive higher responsibility for environmental problems
than students from chemical engineering which we take here as a control group for students
with other majors. This suggests that the connectedness of infrastructure and environment isunderstood already fairly early on.

We further showed that senior civil engineering students appear to have higher
environmental problem awareness than students majoring in economy. Whether this is due toeducation or prior interest in environmental issues we cannot distinguish though. Independentof distinguishing the cause for the difference, our findings suggest that graduates with an
economic major might have a different outlook on transport problems than graduates fromengineering faculties. This is in line with Yezer et al. (1996) who compared cooperation indilemma situations between economic students and those belonging to other faculties. They
found that economic students co-operate less and that exposure to economic classes iscorrelated with lowered cooperation. Erikson (2008) also shows that cooperation in dilemma
situations and pro-environmental behavior are related.

We also verified that, among civil engineering students, education increases
environmental problem awareness. Problem awareness includes “self and personal aspects”,
i.e. understanding of the environmental effects of one’s own actions as well as the effects ofenvironmental problems on one’s own future. Such problem awareness will help transportdecision makers to understand the importance of sustainable transport policy. We could notverify any direct education effects on ascribed responsibility which we would also hope for. In
particular gaining “social ascribed responsibility” will help transport planners to understandthe role of community involvement for achieving sustainable transport. There appears to bethough an indirect effect of education on ascribed responsibility via problem awareness.

Our fourth major finding is that education also influences attitudes to transportation
policies, again highlighting the role of university education in shaping our future transport
policies. We demonstrate with an SEM analysis that congestion awareness and ascribed
responsibility influence attitudes towards various transportation policies among engineering
students. It is shown that support for transport policies that promote public transport and car
use restrictions, are significantly correlated with environmental concern. This means thatstudents who have been better educated about environmental issues are more likely to support
the usage of public transport or the need of other environmental policies. More generally, one
might also conclude that increasing public awareness of, and responsibility for, environmental
issues is important to gain wider support for specific transportation policies.

We believe therefore that our study highlights the role of education for attitudes totransport policy. We show the effect of environmental education but cannot clearly distinguishit from the general education effect. Therefore it is beyond this study to give some specificsuggestions on detailed subjects that should be included in a curriculum. What we canconclude though is the importance of raising the perception of responsibility and problem
awareness through education. Connected to this and our findings by comparing students fromdifferent faculties, we suggest that our study implies that employers of graduates are welladvised to consider not only knowledge and skills but rather wider education and generalenvironmental interests when recruiting.

Our study clearly has some limitations, as already discussed in various parts of thispaper. We conclude this paper by highlighting three main issues that we hope can beaddressed in further work with additional data. Firstly, our proxy for the amount ofenvironmental education is the number of modules students have taken with the name“environment” in the module title. Obviously, also other modules might teach environmental
aspects and we cannot distinguish further the content or quality of education with our survey.
Secondly, as mentioned, in our comparison with students from other faculties, we cannot
control whether students entering the faculty of engineering already choose this faculty
because of previous environmental interests. Thirdly, we did not consider “knowledge” ofenvironmental issues and transport policy directly. Instead we suppose that problem
awareness is activated by knowledge about environmental issues (c.f. Schwartz, 1977). We
therefore included environmental problem awareness as an indirect index for knowledge. In
subsequent work one might ask some direct questions on knowledge of specificenvironmental as well as transport policy related questions though. Schade and Schlag (2003)
indicate that knowledge is an important variable for acceptance of pricing policies, andmoreover education should improve knowledge which in turn may change attitudes.

Therefore in future studies we hope to repeat this survey and collect panel data inorder to directly measure the change in environmental attitudes over the four years. We
further hope that with more detailed data the effect of some specific modules onenvironmental attitudes can be analyzed. Finally, it is our hope that similar studies might also
be conducted at other universities in order to confirm our findings and derive more detailed
practical conclusions on how to best educate future transport planners.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the various staff who allowed us to survey in their classes. In
addition we would like to thank Dr. Giancarlo Flores for various discussion related toliterature on the vision for civil engineering.

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