Modelling Travelers’ Behavior in the Presence of Reward Schemes Offered for Green Multimodal Choices

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of reward-based schemes on altering traveler’s decision making towards sustainable multimodal transportation. For this purpose, a questionnaire survey is conducted in the context of the EC-H2020 funded project “OPTIMUM” within which suitable stated preference experiments are designed. Apart from the traditional multimodal attributes, such as travel time and travel cost, each stated preference experiment is supplemented by an attribute which represents a reward-based scheme. A mixed logit model is estimated where the individual’s utility is linearly dependent on the respondent’s socio-demographics and the attributes of the different multimodal alternatives. Our analysis indicates that, overall, the reward-based incentives could slightly contribute to the promotion of sustainable and emerging transport services. In specific, offering credits and monetary rewards may be effective in altering travellers’ behavior, while the provision of other non-financial passenger services does not influence individuals’ travel choice. In addition, it is found that individuals are more likely to use car-sharing in the presence of monetary rewards, while the alternatives “Public transport with bike-sharing” and “Public transport with Bicycle” are positively affected in the presence of credits.