Moving Communities Forward: Social Marketing and Social Change for Transportation
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Summary
This report details the outcomes of a professional training initiative titled "Moving Communities Forward: Social Marketing and Social Change for Transportation," conducted by Julie Bond and Amy Lester from the University of South Florida. The project was sponsored by the Center for Transportation, Equity, Decisions and Dollars (CTEDD) and funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation. The research addresses the premise that many contemporary transportation challenges, such as congestion and safety issues, can be mitigated through behavioral changes rather than solely through infrastructure expansion. Specifically, the study explores the application of social marketing—a discipline focused on influencing behaviors for social good—to encourage travelers to adopt efficient modes of transport, such as transit, biking, walking, or teleworking, and to reject unsafe practices like texting while driving. The methodology involved a mobile, action-oriented workshop designed for transportation professionals. The training combined online learning with in-person sessions held at three national locations: Boise, Idaho; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Arlington, Texas. Each site accommodated 12 participants, totaling 36 professionals. The curriculum aimed to improve participants' knowledge of established behavior change theories and practical skills, including creating journey maps, segmenting markets, and pretesting materials. Participants worked in small teams to develop people-centered social marketing plans tailored to specific local transportation challenges, relying on both data and insight to design effective programs. The findings highlight the specific objectives developed by participants in each location. In Boise, teams focused on increasing smart commuting among parents with young children and encouraging downtown employers to adopt smart commute benefits. In Arlington, the plans targeted increasing vanpooling and carpooling among employees and establishing Employment Transportation Coordinators within companies. In Raleigh, objectives included incentivizing employers to trade parking permits for transit passes, promoting carpooling via a conceptual app, and implementing employer-led incentives for carpooling. These plans were designed to address rapid population growth and associated congestion and parking difficulties in these urban cores. The significance of this project lies in its successful delivery of practical tools to transportation professionals for implementing behavior change strategies. The workshops received high ratings, with all attendees indicating the training would be useful for their work. The project resulted in the creation of a booklet containing findings and implementable strategies from the three workshops, distributed to participants to aid in further program development. This initiative demonstrates the viability of social marketing as a cost-effective approach to managing transportation demand and improving community mobility through targeted behavioral interventions.
Key finding
The training successfully equipped 36 transportation professionals to develop and implement social marketing plans targeting specific behavioral changes like increased transit use and carpooling in three different cities.
Methodology
mixed_methods
Sample size: 36
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via bulk_ingest_rosap on 2026-05-23 (6 acquisition events logged).
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | rosap | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-23 |
| archive | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| chunk | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| embed | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-02 |
| enrich | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-23 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 19 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
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