Rewarding for Avoiding the Peak Period: A Synthesis of Four Studies in the Netherlands

Charging road users for ‘bad behaviour’ may be used to improve mo-bility and alleviate congestion. Rewarding road users for ‘good behaviour’ may be used to achieve the same objective, however it sends out a positive instead of a negative incentive, and will therefore be more easily accepted by travellers con-fronted with such pricing policies. In the Netherlands, experiments have been conducted in order to investigate travel behaviour when people are rewarded for avoiding the peak period by car. Furthermore, some real life rewarding projects were defined in order to positively influence traffic conditions in situations where road works may temporarily worsen the traffic conditions. This paper presents outcomes of these studies. It is found that in all four case studies the (volunteer-ing) travellers are willing to adjust their departure time significantly for some modest monetary rewards. Also route and mode shifts were observed. The effec-tiveness of the rewarding scheme is strongly determined by the setup and the loca-tion (definition of peak period, reward level, available public transport, available alternative routes, etc.).Transport and PlanningCivil Engineering and Geoscience