What Makes You Bike? Exploring Persuasive Strategies to Encourage Low-Energy Mobility

This paper explores three persuasive strategies and their capacity to encourage biking as a low-energy mode of transportation. The strategies were designed based on: (I) triggering messages that harness social influence to facilitate more frequent biking, (II) a virtual bike tutorial to increase biker's self-efficacy for urban biking, and (III) an arranged bike ride to help less experienced bikers overcome initial barriers towards biking. The potential of these strategies was examined based on self-reported trip data from 44 participants over a period of four weeks, questionnaires, and qualitative interviews. Strategy I showed a significant increase of 13.5 percentage points in share of biking during the intervention, strategy II indicated an increase of perceived self-efficacy for non-routine bikers, and strategy III provided participants with a positive experience of urban biking. The explored strategies contribute to further research on the design and implementation of persuasive technologies in the field of mobility.