GoEco! A community based eco-feedback approach to promote sustainable personal mobility styles

The present urban transportation system, mostly tailored for cars, has long shown its limitations. In many urban areas alternative and effective transport modes are already available, ranging from well-established systems such as the public transportation and slow mobility networks, to emerging alternatives such as vehicle-sharing systems. However, changing collective mobility behaviour towards sustainability is particularly difficult, since at the individual level private motorised transport is still perceived as positive and desirable, while attempts to reduce its use are limited by social and psychological barriers, such as the fear for sacrifices, the fear of returning to the past, or the fear of losing social prestige. To understand such a complex framework, this project seeks to overcome the traditional technology-centred approach and proposes an innovative, community-based approach, directly addressing citizens and their everyday mobility choices. In particular, the main objective of our GoEco! project is to investigate if and how information feedback and social interactions (social comparison and peer pressure) can be effective in fostering changes in personal mobility behaviour, facilitating the long-term challenge to reduce private motorized transport and bringing about a transition to different mobility options, such as vehicle-sharing, intermodal use of transport means, public transportation and slow mobility. Research in social and environmental psychology has in fact shown that one of the most powerful triggers for sustainability transitions lays in providing bottom-up personal feedback and comparison with the behaviour and performances of other members of one’s community: individual feedback and social comparison activate competition and a strive to stand out among peers. To test such theories in the mobility sector, we create a “living lab” experiment, which is a field study involving real-life users in complex, real-world settings.The wide acceptance of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) and location tracking applications enables us to run a medium-to-large-scale living lab experiment, with a significant number of users sharing information about their mobility behaviour and receiving feedback on their choices. Within the GoEco! living lab, in fact, eight hundred users will test a smart-device application developed on purpose, that challenges them to modify their mobility behaviour:•by tracking their trips, providing them with feedback on their mobility behaviour and suggesting alternative, low-impact modal options; •by letting them define personal reduction objectives and targets;•and by setting up a community-based motivational system exploiting “gamification” elements, such as leaderboards, rewards and competitions, which acts as a further trigger to encourage behaviour change. To get a broader understanding of the complex phenomenon of behaviour change, the living lab will be deployed both in Canton Ticino and in the City of Zürich, two contexts which are very different both in the supply of mobility options and in the socio-cultural attitude of the population towards mobility. Moreover, to get a deeper insight on the users' perceptions and attitudes and to strengthen the results of the living lab experiment, a selection of the GoEco! participants will be closely followed throughout the experiment, by means of focus groups and interviews. In conclusion, the GoEco! living lab will allow us to understand how major socio-economic variables such as gender, age, education and income influence attitudes and perceptions towards mobility. Besides, it will also provide us with the chance to identify the main opportunities and barriers to change and to gather bottom-up policy recommendations for local public authorities, with the final aim of promoting a wider and deeper change at the general society level.