Operations News - Details

Smartphone Travel Incentives Final Report
Posted: 2/25/2025

The FHWA Smartphone Travel Incentives Study, with a focus on nudges and incentives, was designed to encourage drivers to reveal "what it would take" to persuade them to change their travel (absent expensive and time-consuming trial-and-error pricing tests). This information would help state and local transportation departments and agencies to design successful and cost-effective incentive programs to minimize congestion and serve travelers better. For participants with habitual or repeated drive-alone trips, the study sought to determine their minimum willingness to accept (WTA) financial reward to shift their driving out of the peak-of-the-peak travel period, or to change their travel mode. A bidding game to discern WTA values was developed and beta tested before the deployment. Unfortunately, few true WTA values were learned due to: there were too few who placed bids; many participant bids lacked any logical consistency; and participants with "winning bids" often failed to follow through–a requirement to collect the compensation–in taking a trip in the less-congestion-inducing manner they had promised when offered compensation at or above their asserted WTA values. The main takeaways of this study relate to the challenges in and possibilities for designing future research into the influence of financial incentives on travel behaviors.

URL: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop24078/fhwahop24078.pdf


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