Using mobility management to reduce private car use: Results from a natural field experiment in Norway

Implementing economically efficient transport policies, in particular implementing price based instruments, is a politically challenging issue. Efficient and politically feasible policy alternatives could therefore make a very valuable contribution to solving transport challenges. Mobility management might be one such policy. We argue that a major weakness of earlier studies is that they only test bundles of different policy elements, and do not attempt to analyse how the elements work in isolation or how they interact to produce the large effects reported. Furthermore, there is often a lack of an appropriate control group against which to compare the treatment effects. We conduct a natural field experiment to test the effectiveness of tailored information, both in isolation, and in combination with free public transit passes, in encouraging commuters to shift from private cars to public transport. In our controlled experiment we find no significant treatment effects.