Nudging urban travellers towards greener travel modes: A virtual reality experiment

Abstract

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Cities worldwide face increasing pressure to reduce carbon emissions from transportation systems, yet implementing new transport policies often involves high costs and uncertainties. This study introduces an immersive virtual reality (VR) tool as a flexible, low-cost approach for evaluating travel demand management (TDM) strategies before real-world deployment. In a repeated discrete choice experiment (1,260 observations), participants chose between a taxi (high carbon) and a bus (low carbon) across multiple scenarios, each featuring variations in cost, travel time, and carbon attribute levels. Three nudge interventions were designed to highlight environmental impacts at three different decision points. The findings demonstrate that strategically timed nudges offer policymakers a scalable tool to promote sustainable urban mobility by integrating salient environmental feedback into decision-making contexts. These results underscore VR’s potential to simulate realistic policy interventions and generate inputs to quantify the impact of different types of interventions alongside travel attributes.