| Summary: | 博士 === 國立交通大學 === 運輸科技與管理學系 === 99 === The aim of this study was to develop a conceptual framework to measure stakeholders’ policy beliefs on sustainable transportation implementation and then conduct experimental trials aimed at exploring stakeholders’ policy beliefs. We conceptualized policy belief as the combined effect of people’s objective constraints and subjective considerations, and viewed it as a latent trait. Exploring policy beliefs can provide insights regarding the mindset of those initiating policies and, thus, help predict outcomes prior to implementation. In this study, we first discuss the development of policy beliefs and the factors affecting their development. An effective approach for measuring senior officials’ and the general public’s policy beliefs is then suggested. Next, we describe an empirical study of the policy beliefs of senior officials and the general public, as well as a comparison of two groups of stakeholders.
This study quantitatively evaluated beliefs about sustainable transportation policies from senior officials and the general public by using the Rasch model since it has been intensively used in psychometric studies to estimate values on an interval scale based on ordinal responses. The results have shown that not only senior officials but also the general public believe that providing a more efficient and friendly public transportation service to attract people’s patronage would be more practicable than limiting private car use by increasing usage costs. For the senior officials, the longer an official is in a position the more experience and power he or she will attain; thus, seniority, experience, and power tend to drive policy success. As the officials become more senior they gain more administrative experience and the better they feel they can judge policy feasibility; they are more confident when implementing policy.
Furthermore, by extending the results based on respondents’ commuting modes we found the policy preference rankings from the public transport commuters are the same as from the general public. “Developing new energy sources” was found to be the strategy in which both the private and the public transport commuters were most confident for implementing sustainable transportation policy. However, for people who commuted by private transport and were willing to act to mitigate private transport use, their policy belief regarding constructing rail transport systems to achieve sustainable transport was stronger than the public as a whole.
The study also revealed significant differences in policy beliefs between private and public transport commuters after DIF analysis. Public transport commuters are more confident than private transport commuters in the policies that raise usage costs, such as “Congestion Road Pricing on CBD,” “Increase gasoline prices to reduce car use,” and “Increase parking fees to reduce car use.” In addition, to achieve the goal of sustainable transportation, people who commute by private transport are more confident than public transport commuters in policies that “Provide instant traffic information to reduce driving time,” “Subsidize public to modify car by using LPG,” and “Implement electronic toll collection (ETC).” The findings and lessons learned from the two subgroups of people who owned and did not own a passenger car are the same as from the two subgroups of commuters using private and public transport.
In addition, independent samples t-tests were used to identify significant differences between senior officials and the public on each item. The result revealed that the public believes more strongly than the senior officials in the effectiveness of building public transport centers as a means for achieving sustainable transportation. Except for constructing rail transport systems, the public is more optimistic that these policies will benefit sustainable transportation than are the senior officials. In other words, it indicates that senior officials are more conservative than the public regarding whether these policies will benefit sustainable transportation.
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