Spatio-Temporal Information and Communication Technologies Supporting Sustainable Personal Mobility

Abstract

Mobility and transport are responsible for approx. 30% of the total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions caused by humanity, primarily due to the fact that 95% of the required energy is provided by non-renewable fossil fuels. Reducing this dependence on crude oil and optimizing mobility will not only increase its sustainability, but will also positively impact the climate, our health and environment, and, if implemented correctly, ease the use of mobility and ensure equal access for everyone. This dissertation focuses on soft incentives enabled by ongoing advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Next to technological advances and policy changes, such incentives have the potential to foster changes in mobility consumption and behavior. This is especially important in the short term, as other measures often take decades to implement. The persuasive applications treated within this work are based on automatically and passively recorded mobility data that not only give insights about the use of a transport system, but also allow giving feedback and interacting with individual people directly. To extract information useful within a persuasive application, we first propose several methods to process mobility data to uncover individual mobility descriptors, preferences and progress along various stages of behavior change. Based on this information, we present route computation algorithms that can supply people with feasible and meaningful proposals of alternative behaviors (i.e., route options). The presented formalism and the related methods allow integrating a wide range of transport modes into high-level route planners. The proactive computation of transport options (including less commonly used transport modes such as carpooling) reduces the burden of finding means of travel and thus facilitates trying out and adopting more environmentally sustainable mobility behaviors. Finally, we propose a set of (gamified) elements to be used within persuasive (smartphone) applications to effectively support people in making sustainable choices. The resulting framework is evaluated using the large-scale study GoEco!, and we find significant changes in mobility along systematic routes and for groups of people that rely on the car as their predominant means of transport.