Showing all posts tagged: stanford
How can we diminish traffic congestion? Turns out that adding more roads can paradoxically increase traffic, so that’s not reliable. What about charging higher tolls on highways during peak commute times? Well, that requires legislation, which — as Bloomberg discovered in New York — may be impossible to get. How about paying people to change their behavior?
Experimental Campaigns Pay Drivers to Avoid Rush-Hour Traffic - John Markoff via NYTimes.com
[…] this spring, with a $3 million research grant from the federal Department of Transportation, Stanford deployed a new system designed by Dr. [Balaji] Prabhakar’s group. Called Capri, for Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives, it allows people driving to the notoriously traffic-clogged campus to enter a daily lottery, with a chance to win up to an extra $50 in their paycheck, just by shifting their commute to off-peak times.
The program has proved so popular that it is to be expanded soon to also cover parking.
Amaya Odiaga, the director of business operations for Stanford’s physical education department, now drives to campus a few minutes earlier and says she has won just $15. But a co-worker got $50 — creating a competitive atmosphere that makes the program fun, Ms. Odiaga said.
Better yet, Ms. Odiaga’s commute now takes as little as 7 minutes, down from 25 minutes at peak hours.
Dr. Prabhakar is a specialist in designing computer networks and has conducted a variety of experiments in using incentives to get people to change their behavior in driving, taking public transit, parking and even adopting a more active lifestyle. Unlike congestion pricing, which is mandatory for everyone and usually requires legislation, “incentives can be started incrementally and are voluntary,” he said.
Moreover, systems based on incentives can offer a huge advantage in simplicity. Until recently, the Stanford system required sensors around campus to detect signals from radio-frequency identification tags that participants carried in their cars. But the need for such an infrastructure has vanished now that so many drivers carry smartphones with GPS chips or other locaters.
In principle, Capri-like systems could be deployed by municipal or regional traffic systems, so that if there is some calculable benefit in decreasing traffic, perhaps lottery-style giveaways to those that move their travel to off-peak is the coming norm.
The same approach can help to decrease public transit crowding, too:
Experimental Campaigns Pay Drivers to Avoid Rush-Hour Traffic - John Markoff via NYTimes.com
Singapore is considering a system he and his students designed that offers lottery participation or a fare discount to public transit riders who travel at off-peak times. A trial run begun in January lowered rush-hour ridership by more than 10 percent. (Given a choice between discounts and lottery, riders overwhelmingly chose the lottery.)
