Leveraging Organizations for Sustainable Commuting: A Field Study

Local governments are seeking effective ways to promote sustainable commuting for reducing energy consumption and improving commuters’ experience. We present a threepronged field study of transportation practices, focusing on commuters, organizations, and public administrators. In this position paper we describe the study, our preliminary findings, requirements, and open questions for designing technologies that could help to better leverage organizations as proactive stakeholders for sustainable commuting. INTRODUCTION This position paper focuses on sustainability in people’s transportation behaviors. In particular, it focuses on promoting sustainable commuting. Consistently with the workshop aims, this research project tries to put into practice knowledge from both within and beyond the CHI community in order to better promote sustainable behaviors by individual commuters. While past HCI research has predominantly focused on individual behaviors and technology, research outside HCI has focused on policies, institutions, and infrastructure [12]. The work draws on studies of transportation policies, social studies of behavior change, and HCI studies and systems in support of healthy and sustainable behaviors. As a contribution to design, theory, and methods, this work proposes a three-level approach to promote behavior change. The approach involves characterizing roles, specifying requirements, and envisioning technologies for three key stakeholders: public administrators, organizational personnel, and commuters. Transportation is a key domain for promoting sustainability in the EU and in the US as it accounts for about one third of their energy consumption. Nevertheless, changing the transportation habits of large populations of citizens is a hard challenge. Local governments and companies have developed interventions to support sustainable mobility. However, most of the interventions did not reach the critical mass necessary to have sufficient impact [9]. Our work is motivated by an emerging practice among numerous local governments: using “travel plans” as policy interventions and, in so doing, engaging organizations as active players to promote sustainable commuting among their employees. While travel plans have been successfully used in some countries, it still remains difficult to systematically engage organizations and their employees in such efforts. To understand the issues that limit the impact of current practices, we propose a three-level approach (see Figure 1), which was implemented in our field study. From the study we extracted implications for the design of new technologies to better leverage organizations as proactive stakeholders in support of sustainable commuting. Figure 1. Three-level approach used in the field study (11 interviewees: 2 P, 5 O, 4 E) RELATED WORK Studies of “travel plans” or transportation policies constitute a first area of related research. A travel plan consists of a set of policies and incentives to reduce Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) usage and promote greener commuting choices instead. E.g., a travel plan includes targeted subsidies for using buses, trains, or car sharing, and lets the individual organizations adopt selected elements. A few recent studies commenced evaluating the success of travel plans. In a study of 25 organizations in the UK, Roby [10] found that they tend to work in organizations that progress from a reactive to a proactive role. These are organizations that progressively recognize the benefits of travel plans and that adapt them to their own objectives, such as organizational change management, or flexible working practices. Roby also points to the new role that Human Resource managers are having as travel planners for the employees of their organization [10]. A second area of related work pertains to social studies of behavior change, and factors that affect it. These include qualitative studies of commuters such as Dalla Rosa’s [4] research on automobile ownership and mode choice, quantitative or survey-based studies by psychologists, and theoretical models of behavior change for HCI purposes, such those reviewed by Hekler et al. [5]. A third area of related work pertains to emerging technologies or services in support of healthy and sustainable behaviors (e.g., UbiGreen [6]) or, specifically, sustainable mobility (e.g., CarbonDiem [2] Ozenc [9], SuperHub [11]). Some tools, such as CarbonDiem, focus on detecting and representing people’s habits and energy consumption. Some government-funded research projects such as SuperHub [11] proposed prototypes that integrate tools for commuters, such as mobile apps, with tools for administrators, such as a city dashboard for managing incentives and communications. However, most of these tools focus primarily on the individual citizen and do not involve the organization as a proactive stakeholder.