The impact of migration background and ethnicity on car, bus and bicycle use in England

Abstract People with a migration background and/or who belong to ethnic minorities tend to have different travel behaviour, mainly in terms of lower car use. A better understanding of this nexus is needed, yet there is a lack of quantitative studies on this topic from the United Kingdom. We fill this gap by analysing data from the 2018–2019 wave of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey. With ordinal regression models, we investigate the impact of migration generation and belonging to ethnic minorities on the frequency of car, bus, and bicycle use. We explore to what extent these associations are accounted for by differences in socio-demographic and -economic characteristics, residential location, and accessibility at neighbourhood level, driving licence and access to a car, while also exploring ethnic neighbourhood effects. Our results show that travel behaviour varies substantially depending on migration background and ethnicity, with the latter playing a larger role. Nevertheless, many of these differences are accounted for by socio-economic and residential characteristics. We find evidence of a net association between certain ethnic groups and travel mode use, e.g., lower than expected levels of cycling among participants that identify themselves as “Asian or Asian British” or “Black or Black British”, and higher levels of bus use among “Black or Black British”. We interpret these as suggestive of differences in cultural attitudes and socialisation. We find suggestive evidence of transport assimilation effects, but only little evidence of ethnic neighbourhood effects. We discuss our findings in the context of debates on sustainable transport and transport-related inequalities.