A SHORT SCALE OF TRAFFIC CLIMATE ACROSS FIVE COUNTRIES

The Traffic Climate Scale (TCS) measures the perceptions and attitudes of road users about the given traffic context with three dimensions: external affective demands, functionality, and internal requirements. The TCS was developed in Turkish and then translated into several languages. The main aim of the current study was to develop a shorter version of the TCS and to test the factor structures cross-culturally (i.e. Estonia, Greece, Kosovo, Russia, and Turkey). In addition, the five countries were compared in terms of their perceived traffic climate.  Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the fit of the models. The results yielded two different Mini-TCS versions that were developed based on the previous longer versions. The two Mini-TCS versions included 22 items and 16 items respectively. The goodness of fit findings showed that both versions of the Mini-TCS are useful short measures of the TCS in Estonia, Greece, Kosovo, Russia and Turkey. The comparison analyses showed that five countries had both similarities and differences in terms of their traffic climate. To illustrate, Turkey, Greece, and Kosovo had the highest scores in external affective demands and internal requirements dimensions; whereas Kosovo, Russia, and Estonia had the highest scores in functionality dimension in both long and short versions. The findings suggested that both versions of Mini-TCS are effective tools that can be used to understand how road users conceptualize traffic context in these five countries.