Nudging the Commute: Using Behaviorally Informed Interventions to Promote Sustainable Transportation

One way to limit the emissions from fossil fuel combustion that underlie global climate change and air pollution is to nudge people away from commuting alone in their vehicles—that is, to gently encourage people (without limiting their freedom of choice) to replace single-occupancy-vehicle commutes with environmentally friendlier options. Abundant research has focused on the influence of external factors—for example, urban design, the availability of roadways and bicycle lanes, and the costs of using one's chosen means of transportation—on commuters’ transportation decisions. Much less is known about the psychological factors that influence which commuting modes people use. The field of behavioral science is therefore overdue to focus on transportation. In this article, we—a multidisciplinary team consisting of academics, applied researchers, and a transportation-management consultant—present a framework for designing and testing interventions informed by behavioral theory. We hope that this framework will help policymakers in government and the private sector identify nudges that can encourage commuters to adopt eco-friendlier modes of transportation. We also describe several studies we have designed on the basis of this framework and present the results collected so far.