Status quo bias and travel behaviour

People have a tendency to stick with the status quo. They often forego opportunities for improving their situation, without even giving consideration to these opportunities. Status quo bias may be more pronounced in mobility behaviour than in other human activities, for instance because of the symbolic and affective value of cars. Route choice also appears to be very stable through time. Possible approaches to remedy the status quo problem include the provision of costless multi-modal travel information and introducing a temporary structural change, such as offering auto drivers a temporary free bus ticket

Reusing past solutions makes life easier and less risky (Garling and Axhausen, 2003). Whenever people develop habits, this allows them to save on cognitive efforts.

Not surprisingly, this inertia has also been found to be true in mobility behaviour. Once people have chosen a transport mode and a route to reach a certain destination, there is a strong tendency to stick to this mode (Gardner, 2009) and route (Srinivasan and Mahmassani, 2000).

Actually, there are several reasons why the status quo bias may be even more pronounced in mobility behaviour than in other human activities.

Indeed, in the case of mode choice, people are also influenced by the symbolic and affective value of cars: people seem to choose on the basis of an ‘‘affect pool” associating a positive tag with car use. This “affect heuristic” could be the result of repeated mental associations over time, which results in people generating intuitive responses that could previously have been the outcome of analytic thinking (see Steg, 2003). People also tend to underestimate the costs of cars because there is a time gap between car use and the payment of the costs. In other words, the variable costs of the car are not salient enough (Metcalfe and Dolan, 2012).

As far as policy is concerned, Garling and Axhausen (2003) argue that it is important to understand how habits are broken, in other words, how to ensure that choices become deliberate and rational again. Several approaches to ‘habit breaking’ have been proposed.

For instance, Aarts et al. (1997) have found that people who have to explicitly explain their choices tend to consider the available transport options in more depth, and to be more consistent in the way they process information on these options. However, it is not clear how such great “accountability” could be implemented, although the use of social networks may be an option.

In the same league, people’s awareness could be increased by requiring them to explicitly explain the context of each planned trip chain, and to indicate alternative travel modes if they planned to use the car (Garvill, Marell, and Nordlund, 2003).

An alternative that holds a lot of potential in these times of ever more reliable and immediate travel data is to provide costless multi-modal travel information. If the information is considered reliable, this may slow down the emergence of inertia (Chorus and Dellaert, 2012).

Another possibility is for policy makers to introduce a temporary structural change, such as offering auto drivers a temporary free bus ticket. Fujii and Kitamura (2003) have conducted an experiment in which a one-month free bus ticket was given to 23 drivers in an experimental group but not to 20 drivers in a control group. The results showed indeed that attitudes toward bus use became more positive and that the frequency of bus use increased after the intervention.