Rewarding Sustainable Transportation Choices : Impacts of App-Based Outreach and Incentive Distribution

What is the most effective way to influence travellers’ behaviour using positive incentives andrewards? The European Project EMPOWER implements a diverse strategy to significantly reducethe use of conventionally fuelled vehicles (CFV) in urban areas, through influencing the behaviourof car drivers. The aim is to incentivise users of CFVs to change their behaviour with positiveincentives, thus rewarding them, rather than penalizing them, for making sustainable transportationchoices. This paper targets the setup and effects of the experiments performed in Sweden,including an expansion of the service from the main Living Lab in Gothenburg to other cities inSweden, where users are incentivized through a smartphone app called SMARTiSverige. In thetwo-step experiment presented in this paper, we used the app to collect data to develop challenges,communicate personalized challenges to users, and communicate the points achieved if thechallenges are completed successfully. Digital and physical rewards were then distributed to theusers as a part of the complete scheme system. In addition to an account of the experiment andachieved results, this paper also discusses the implication of this research on the existing body ofknowledge regarding incentives, and elaborates on how the lessons learned from this Living Labcould be used to scale up services in future sites for rewarding sustainable transport choices andimpacting the use of CFVs