When it comes to mobility behaviors, it’s always a difficult task to distinguish choice and constraint. This paper tries to disentangle both with a quantitative approach based on Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Instead of considering broad difficulties in getting around, it mixes latent and observed variables to summarize modal difficulties, i.e., walking difficulties, driving difficulties, difficulties with public transport.
Our findings contribute to a better knowledge of older adults’ immobility:
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There seems to be a gap between highly mobile pensioners, going out every day, and older adults staying at home at least once a week. None of the variables used here seems to be able to grasp the characteristics of each group. This result would tend to show that loosening work constraints doesn’t necessarily result in a gradual increase of immobility. This comes as a nuance to Motte-Baumvol et al. previous results on English travel diaries (2022).
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Transport difficulties, may they be walking or driving difficulties, are closely linked to social characteristics such as diploma, gender or residential location relative to urban scale. However, the age factor still explains most of the variance. More than anything else, older adults’ immobility has to do with driving and walking difficulties.
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Driving difficulties trigger immobility for car owners, but eventually it only concerns less than 5% of individuals living in motorized households.
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Physical difficulties are a significant and important factor of immobility for non-motorized individuals, and to a lesser extent for motorized singles. On the other hand, this does not significantly affect motorized individuals living in couple. This would mean that the car on the one hand and a spouse on the other hand allow to overcome some physical difficulties of getting around.
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Among the factors that have a clear negative relationship with immobility, living in a dense urban area has a significant effect for all categories of households. This proves that density tends to limit the level of immobility.
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Expectedly, the link between immobility and difficulties with public transport isn’t significant, but it should be noted that the correlations between all difficulties are strong, and that the French National Transport Survey took place in 2018–2019, before many urban transport tickets’ digitalization, which might have increased specific mobility digital divide. Moreover, if people keep on driving until they experience important driving difficulties, one can expect that physical difficulties and difficulties with public transport would be too big to provide a proper alternative at that time.
Among the limits of this study, we can point out the way transport difficulties are defined and their blind spots. Orientation in space for example and feeling insecure are not quoted in the questionnaire, in spite of being among the most frequent reasons why people are deterred from walking, according to a recent literature review on cycling and walking (Albrecher, Curnier, and Kaufmann 2023).
Moreover, last French NTS was collected before Covid, whereas the pandemic not only changed the way we now see and experience immobility, but also contributed to the massive development of at home services, from deliveries to on demand videos.
Since then, social isolation has become a major public health issue (Murthy 2023), with reports from the World Health Organization targeting older adults (Mikton et al. 2021). In parallel, sedentary lifestyles have long been pointed out as “a risk factor in non-communicable diseases” (Pierre et al. 2022).
The links between immobility, social isolation and sedentarity are not equivocal, and our work highlights the need for further research on the subject, be it qualitative (Després 2023) or quantitative, with more attention given on social networks (Carrasco and Lucas 2019): “For retired people, information on involvement in associations or their social network or anything that could generate both spatial and temporal constraints could help us to understand the variability of travel and therefore immobility” (Motte-Baumvol et al. 2022).
However, our findings still might have many implications for public actions. First, it might help targeting groups of population that are more at risk of immobility: individuals without a car, living alone, encountering physical difficulties to move around for those without car, and driving difficulties for motorized individuals.
Second, policies aiming at car reduction should take age into account and provide adapted alternatives for older adults: for them, car sharing or carpooling schemes could then be more efficient than plain public transport.
Third, policies aimed at curbing car usage among the elderly, due to physical and mental impairments, must be approached with caution. Car mobility represents a crucial means of maintaining independence for senior citizens. The advantages of allowing seniors to drive, despite minor disabilities, often surpass the risks they may pose to themselves and others. It is noteworthy that France, alongside the Netherlands and the UK, features among the nations with the most lenient procedures and minimal medical examination requirements for driving license renewal in Europe, yet boasts the highest rate of license ownership among individuals aged 65 and over (Mitchell 2008). Remarkably, these countries also report the lowest fatality rates for car drivers within this age group. Furthermore, Mitchell (2008) underscores the nuanced dynamics between mobility, safety, and aging by highlighting that individuals aged over 65 are considerably more vulnerable to fatal incidents as pedestrians than as drivers. This observation draws attention to the intricate balance that must be navigated when considering the mobility needs and safety of the elderly.
Last, physical difficulties are contextual, and decrease when Universal Design measures are taken. Far from being a luxury expense for few individuals, physical accessibility helps a lot a people moving around more smoothly. In our ageing societies, home support should not mean home staying, as mobility is so close to agency that some scholars actually mix both. After Bauman and Kaufmann coined the term “motility” to express the potential for mobility and Nordbakke defines mobility as an ability to choose “where, when and which activities to take part in outside the home in everyday life”(2013).