According to the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, transport is the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in France. This places urgent pressure on decision-makers and leaders in the mobility sector to propose alternative solutions and create a more sustainable transport network. What if behavioural science was the key to making the change? From French research campus Paris-Saclay to MIT, more and more researchers are asking this question…
“The main part of my own thinking is the recognition that transportation systems are half physical infrastructure, and half human beings,” says Jinhua Zhao, director of MIT’s JTL Urban Mobility Lab. And yet, over the last decades, transport decision-makers have mostly focused on pursuing technological advances and diversifying urban transport services, without giving much consideration to how passengers actually behave. Transport providers tend to assume that passengers are strictly rational when it comes to their daily commutes, and so the majority of transport systems are built on the idea that people base their travel decisions on journey time and cost.
And yet, this normative approach has had little effect on changing user behaviors. “It seems necessary to take behavioural science, and particularly social psychology, into greater account in order to create solutions that will lead to a lasting change in transport decisions,” wrote Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in 2019. “People make decisions in all sorts of different ways,” says Professor Zhao in an MIT article entitled What moves people? “The notion that people wake up and calculate the utility of taking the car versus taking the bus — or walking, or cycling — and find the one that maximises their utility doesn’t speak to reality.”