Changing travel habits with incentives

Challenge

We collaborated with Skånetrafiken, the operator of public transport in south of Sweden, to explore different ways to drive people to adapt a new habit of travelling by public transport. We wanted to understand what would be more effective: nudging or economic incentives.

Intervention

We designed several randomized controlled trials with over 32,000 individuals, who recently moved to Skåne region or within the region. Currently, when people move within Skåne or to Skåne they receive free public transport cards for two weeks. We tested several interventions to go with this offer of a free public card, and wanted to see what would be most effective to drive people’s towards taking public transport. We tested nudges using social norms like “72 percent of people in Skåne travel by public transport”, as well as reversed social norms (“Only 28% percent of people in Skåne do not travel by public transport”) and implementation intentions. We also tested an economic incentive of doubling the trial period of the free transport card from two weeks to four weeks.

Impact

We found that the intervention that had the largest measurable effect on travel behavior was the economic incentives. People who received the offer for a 4-week free travel card were 17% more likely to accept the offer, and more importantly – they were significantly more likely to use the card six months later! This means that the increased incentives actually brought long-lasting behavior change.