ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the emergence of a mobility biographies approach in transport studies a new, empirically-grounded method for understanding changing travel behaviour throughout people's lives. It suggests that a key factor in understanding why conventional models fail is their inability to account for the complexity of people's lives. Focusing on the inability of current approaches to address dynamic change in people's lives, Lanzendorf identifies three limitations in the existing research: the dearth of research on the effects of long-term decisions on travel behaviour; the reliance of much travel research on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data; and a focus on statistical correlations between factors rather than on causal relationships. The chapter reviews the contribution that narrative data from the first qualitative panel study focusing on transport and travel practices can make to an emerging literature on mobility biographies in the field of transport studies.
