Global Mobility Culture Comparison and China’s Mobility Management

Funding: MIT Energy Initiative, Mobility of the Future 2016-2019

Mobility is already changing in response to evolving demographics, consumer preferences, new business models, connectedness, technology, alternative fuels, and policy. Future changes are anticipated but there is great uncertainty about the pace of change and which mobility options will be adopted. This multi-PI, multi-year MIT study, Mobility of the Future, will explore these possibilities and examine how complex interactions between engine technology options, fuel options, refueling infrastructure, consumer choice, public transit options, new transportation modalities, and government policy might shape the future landscape for mobility. 

Prof. Jinhua Zhao leads two research components: (1) Global Comparison of Mobility Culture, and (2) Mobility Management Instruments in China: Scenario Setting 2050.

(1) The Global Comparison of Mobility Culture project seeks to measure car pride and car dependence in cities across different countries, explore the sociodemographic, policy, and other influences that contribute to the formation of car pride, and model how car pride and car dependence influence travel behavior (such as car usage and ownership). Implementing a pre-tested survey in select cities around the globe, we will collect primary data on respondent travel behavior and attitudes towards mobility using psychometric tools including the Implicit Association Test.

(2) The Mobility Management Instruments in China project surveys the landscape of municipal transportation policies and constructs future policy scenarios for China. We begin by characterizing current municipal transportation policies along four dimensions: policy instruments, policy objectives, stakeholders, and local contexts. We examine the variations in common patterns in the process of transportation policy-making across Chinese cities. We aim to identify trends in urban transportation systems, mobility patterns, and transportation policy-making over time and use this understanding of the dynamics of transportation policy to develop a set of scenarios. These scenarios will explore three key dimensions – (i) technology development, (ii) mobility policy assertiveness, (iii) and urban land-use regulations – to illustrate and benchmark a broad range of plausible mobility futures.

External link: http://energy.mit.edu/research/mobility-future-study/

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    What prompts the adoption of car restriction policies among Chinese cities

    International Journal of Sustainable Transportation
    (
    2020
    )

    Facing rapid motorization, many Chinese municipalities are implementing policies that restrict car ownership or use. However, there is significant variation in terms of which cities adopt these policies and when. This research systematically investigates what factors prompt local governments in China to adopt these car restriction policies. We collect a database of car restriction policies as well as economic, demographic, land use, and transportation indicators for 287 Chinese municipalities from 2001 to 2014. We adopt a mixed methods approach that combines a qualitative investigation of stated objectives and legislative precedent within policy documents with a quantitative duration model of policy adoption. We find that the adoption of comprehensive car ownership and use restriction policies across Chinese cities primarily responds to local air pollution and secondarily to car ownership and congestion. Policy adoption additionally responds to local subway line constructions. Local economic power and population size do not effectively explain policy adoption. Idiosyncratic effects at provincial or city levels are important, although the underlying mechanisms by which these network effects manifest remain unclear. Broadly, our findings suggest that problem solving and network effects both contribute to the adoption of car restriction policies across China’s cities and that the legal policy documents reliably illustrate the motivations of these policies.

  • The Price of Privacy Control in Mobility Sharing

    Journal of Urban Technology
    (
    2020
    )

    One of the main features in mobility sharing applications is the exposure of personal data provided to the system. Transportation and location data can reveal personal habits, preferences, and behaviors, and riders could be keen not to share the exact location of their origin and/or destination. But what is the price of privacy in terms of decreased efficiency of the mobility sharing system? In this paper, for the first time, we address the privacy issues under this point of view and show how location privacy-preserving techniques could affect the performance of mobility sharing applications, in terms of both System Efficiency and Quality of Service. To this extent, we first apply different data-masking techniques to anonymize geographical information and then compare the performance of shareability networks-based trip matching algorithms for ride-sharing, applied to the real data and to the privacy-preserving data. The goal of the paper is to evaluate the performance of mobility sharing privacy-preserving systems and to shed light on the trade-off between data privacy and its costs. The results show that the total traveled distance increase due to the introduction of data privacy could be bounded if users are willing to spend (or "pay") for more time in order to share a trip, meaning that data location privacy impacts both efficiency and quality of service.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Car Pride and its Bidirectional Relations with Car Ownership: Case Studies in New York City and Houston

    Transportation Research Part A
    124
    ,
    (
    2019
    )

    The car fulfills not only instrumental transportation functions, but also holds important symbolic and affective meaning for its owners and users. In particular, owning and using a car can be a symbol of an individual’s social status or personal image (‘car pride’). This paper introduces and validates a standard measure of car pride estimated from 12 survey statements using a cross-sectional sample of 1,236 commuters in New York City and Houston metropolitan statistical areas. We find that car pride is higher in Houston than in New York City. We then empirically examine the bidirectional relation between car pride (attitude) and household car ownership (behavior) using structural equation modeling. To identify the bidirectional relationship we use an individual’s general pride as the instrumental variable (IV) for that same individual’s car pride; in the opposite direction, we use the average household vehicle ownership in the respondent’s census block group as the IV for the respondent’s household car ownership. We find that positive and statistically significant relations exist between car pride and car ownership in both directions. However, on average and in both city subsamples, the relation from car pride to household car ownership (attitude-to-behavior) is much stronger than the reverse (behavior-to-attitude). In fact, in our models car pride is more predictive of car ownership than most individual and household socio-demographics included in traditional ownership forecasting models, including income. Empowered with a well-validated, standard measure for car pride and a robust approach for exploring reciprocal attitude-behavior relations in cross-sectional data, future research can extend the current understanding presented in this paper to explore car pride’s relation with other travel behaviors, the dynamics of these attitude-behavior relations over time, and their implications for policies to promote sustainable travel behavior.

    Cite as: Moody, Joanna and Jinhua Zhao. 2019. Car pride and its bidirectional relations with car ownership: Case studies in New York City and Houston. Transportation Research Part A: Planning and Policy, 124: 334-353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2019.04.005.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Car Pride and its Behavioral Implications: An Exploration in Shanghai

    Transportation
    (
    2018
    )

    Cars have symbolic significance beyond their functional purpose, and people often take pride in owning and using them. However, little is known about what this pride is and how it affects travel behavior. This paper constitutes the first attempt to provide a conceptual framework of car pride and test its behavioral implications. In this paper, car pride is defined as the self-conscious emotion derived from the appraisal of car ownership and use positively related to one’s identity goals. We categorize car pride into personal pride and social pride, and hypothesize how car pride interacts with behavioral and socio-economic factors. Using survey data (n = 1389) from Shanghai, we empirically test this framework with a series of structural equation models and discrete choice models. We show that: (1) car pride is weakly associated with socio-economic characteristics; (2) car pride correlates significantly with owning newer, more expensive, and larger cars, and Shanghai’s more expensive local car licenses; (3) car pride plays an important role in people’s future car purchase plans, especially for non-car owners on their first cars; (4) higher car pride is associated with more car use and deters people from reducing future car use; and (5) personal pride and social pride, though highly correlated, have different behavioral implications—while personal pride shows more variation based on socio-economic characteristics, social pride has a stronger correlation with car use. Car pride is an important factor in car ownership and use and should therefore be accounted for in travel behavior studies and mobility management policies. 

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Transportation Policy Making in Beijing and Shanghai: Contributors, Obstacles, and Process

    Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
    (
    2018
    )

    With continued motorization and urbanization in Chinese cities, there is a growing demand for innovative transportation policies to address the challenges of congestion, local air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. Using Beijing and Shanghai as case studies, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with municipal government officials and non-governmental experts to document the ways in which transportation policy is currently implemented at the city-level in China. Using recursive and iterative qualitative data analysis techniques, this study (1) further justifies existing factors that contribute to transportation policy decisions, (2) identifies other factors that contribute to or obstruct effective transportation policy implementation in the two cities. The results indicate policy learning, public opinion, and data informatization emerge as key contributors to policy implementation; while public complaint, unilateral decision-making, inadequate coordination among relevant departments, and failure to commit to adaptive policy implementation practice pose significant challenges to adopting timely and appropriate transportation policies. This study finds that in Beijing, and even more so in Shanghai, public opinion is both a contributor and an obstacle to the introduction of new transportation policies. The motivation for policy comes partly from public opinion, but it is also public complaint that sometimes stops policy implementation. The authors conclude by describing the transportation policymaking process in Beijing and Shanghai and identifying where contributors and obstacles fit within this process.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Gaining Acceptance by Informing the People? Public Knowledge, Attitudes, and Acceptance of Transportation Policies

    Journal of Planning Education and Research
    (
    2017
    )

    We examine the connection between public knowledge and attitudes in the context of urban transportation policies. We categorize policy knowledge into received, subjective, and reasoned knowledge, and measure them empirically using a survey of Shanghai’s residents (n=1,000) on the vehicle license auction policy. We quantify the relationship between the three types of knowledge and public acceptance and its predecessors (perceived effectiveness, affordability, and equity). We find variegated impacts of knowledge on acceptance: reasoned knowledge increases acceptance but subjective knowledge decreases it, while received knowledge has no direct impact. Public information needs to emphasize societal benefits and the underlying policy rationale.

     

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Capturing Hidden Attitudes: Introducing the Implicit Association Test to Transportation Planning

    Working paper
    (
    2017
    )

    Transportation planners routinely rely on surveys or other self-report measures (revealed preference or stated preference) to understand people’s travel preference and attitudes. This understanding is fundamental in designing policy interventions toward more sustainable travel choice. However, respondents may hold implicit attitudes that differ from their expressed answers to surveys because of social desirability bias, self-enhancement, or self-ignorance. This mismatch between attitudes measured through surveys and the actual preferences underlying behavior could have wide-ranging impacts on the shape and efficacy of policy interventions meant to influence people’s behavior.
    We introduce the Implicit Association Test (IAT) – a series of computer-based matching exercises that record response time and capture subconscious associations – and evaluated it with specific reference to attitudinal and behavioral understanding for transportation planning. We motivate the use of IAT as a complement to traditional self-report methods, explain the IAT’s underlying modus operandi, and discuss its merits and limitations. We present a case study that explores the influence of social status bias on commuter’s mode choice between car and bus. We find that, in this case, the implicit attitude captured by the IAT better predicts user’s primary commute mode than the explicit measure captured by Likert scale questions. 
    We demonstrate how the IAT can be applied to better understand the sustainability implications of social status bias on peoples travel behavior and we also discuss how the IAT could help planners capture perceptions of equity in transportation services and policies among different population segments. We conclude that the IAT is a viable and valuable tool that can offer unique diagnostic and predictive advantages to planners and policymakers and that further research is warranted to fully exploit IAT’s potential.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Normative and Image Motivations for Compliance with Sustainable Transportation Policy

    Urban Studies
    (
    2016
    )

    Compliance with laws and regulations intended to protect common pool resources in the urban context is essential in tackling problems such as pollution and congestion. A high level of non-compliance necessitates an investigation into motivations behind compliance. The long-held instrumental theory emphasising the dependence of compliance on tangible deterrence measures fails to adequately explain empirical findings. More recently established compliance models incorporate normative, instrumental and image factors as motivations for compliance. We investigate the importance of normative and image motivations for transportation policy compliance, and the influence of the hukou (China’s household registration) on the composition of motivations. Through a case study of Shanghai’s license auction policy to inhibit car growth, we use a structural equation model and data from a survey (n = 1389) of policy attitudes and compliance behaviour. The results show that both locals and migrants comply because of instrumental motivation. However, for locals, normative and image motivations not only influence compliance but do so to a greater degree than instrumental motivations. This stands in stark contrast with the fact that there was no statistical relationship between normative and image motivations and compliance for migrants. The significant contribution of normative and image motivations to compliance in locals bears positive implications for compliance, but the absence of that in migrants is worrying. If only instrumental motivations matter, then the government is really constrained in how it can go about keeping social order. Compliance obtained strictly through social control indicates an unsustainable state of governance. 
  • Induction_bus_and_car

    Implicit and Explicit Measures of Social Status Bias in Mode Choice

    Joanna Moody
    (
    2016
    )

    Transportation planners routinely rely on surveys or other self-report measures to understand people’s mode choice attitudes. This understanding helps shape informational campaigns and other policy interventions to nudge travel behaviour toward more sustainable modes and away from single-occupancy, gasoline-powered vehicles. However, respondents may hold implicit attitudes that differ from their expressed answers to surveys because of social desirability bias, self-enhancement, or self-ignorance. This mismatch between attitudes measured through surveys and the actual preferences underlying behaviour could have wideranging impacts on the shape and efficacy of the policy interventions meant to shape people’s behaviour. In this paper we explore the difference between implicit and explicit measures of social status biases in the mode choice between car and bus and how this bias may affect travel behaviour. By social status bias we refer to people’s association of a mode of transportation with differing levels of success, wealth, or image that is often subconsciously influenced by the cultural context surrounding the travel decision. Implicit measures are collected through an Implicit Association Test (IAT) while explicit measures are collected using traditional Likert-format survey questions. Throughout this discussion, we present preliminary results from primary data collection in New York City, United States.

  • Induction_bus_and_car

    ‘Car Pride’ in New York City vs. Houston: Towards a Cross-Cultural Comparison

    (
    2016
    )

    Presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), Portland, OR, 2016

    Transportation planners routinely rely on surveys or other self-report measures to understand people’s mode choice attitudes. This understanding helps shape informational campaigns and other policy interventions to nudge travel behavior toward more sustainable modes and away from single-occupancy, gasoline-powered vehicles. However, respondents may hold implicit attitudes that differ from their expressed answers to surveys because of social desirability bias, self-enhancement, or self-ignorance (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007). This mismatch between attitudes measured through surveys and the actual preferences underlying behavior could have wide-ranging impacts on the shape and efficacy of the policy interventions meant to shape people’s behavior.

    With results from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and a survey exploring sociodemographic characteristics and travel behavior, we generate implicit and explicit measures of social status biases in the mode choice between car and bus. By social status bias we refer to people’s association of a mode with differing levels of success, wealth, or image that is often subconsciously influenced by the cultural context surrounding the travel decision. Using a novel two-part experimental design, the differences between implicit and explicit measures of bias are examined to understand how the IAT may complement or improve upon traditional survey methods to capture attitudinal biases and explain mode choice behavior. We corroborate previous research on the idea of pride as a factor in explaining car mode choice (Steg, 2004) as well as propose a new way to quantify these inherent or implicit social status biases that are controversial or difficult to consciously identify and articulate.

    We explore the sociodemographic and cultural variables that help explain variation in the magnitude and direction of ‘car pride’ in  New York City vs. Houston. We'll map levels of car pride throughout the five boroughs in NYC and discuss the policy implications of these variations at the municipal level. We lay the foundation for future work comparing motivation and formation of car pride across cultures (Shi et. al., 2015) and its impact on car ownership and usage. 

Team Members