An experimental design of a personalized travel plan (PTP) to encourage behavioral change

This paper describes the experimental design of a voluntary travel behavior change program implemented in Cagliari, Italy. The objective of the work is to contribute to understand the fundamentals of travel behavioral process by identifying the factors underlying behavioral change. More specifically, the PTP program proposed in this work involved 109 participants, from February 2011 to June 2012, in two steps: a first one-week activity-travel data collection to observe current behaviors and a second one-week activity-travel data collection to monitor behavior, after the provision of personalized travel plans. The program has been evaluated observing the behavioral change during the second week of the program (monitoring week) and three months after the end of the program. Further, the factors underlying behavioral change have been analyzed comparing the quantitative feedback provided to participants showing a behavioral change vs. participants who did not change. Results seem to have important policy implications. Indeed, they indicate that providing car users with detailed feedback about current behavior and existing alternatives have a general positive effect on behavioral change