A reward-based instrument for promoting multimodality

•Reward instrumentscould be successful in promoting sustainable multimodal options.•Results from a questionnaire survey and two real-life experiments are presented.•During the experiment, rewards increased time spent in public transport and walking.•Rewards mostly motivated public transport users.•Birmingham’s users were more motivated than Vienna’s participants. Reward-based instruments have the potential to encourage individuals’ shift towards multimodal mobility options, thus contributing to a more sustainable and resilient transport environment. This paper aims to investigate the effects of reward-based instruments on promoting emerging mobility schemes and active transport, through real-world demonstrations in two European cities. Specifically, a route planning mobile application which tracks users’ travel patterns was used to integrate a reward program offering points to incentivize people towards sustainable multimodal choices, including public transport, cycling and walking. In addition, a web-based questionnaire survey was conducted, and a discrete choice model was developed to model individuals’ multimodal choice in the presence of different reward types, including monetary rewards, points and the provision of added value services. Overall, our findings indicate that reward-based instruments can contribute to the promotion of sustainable and emerging transport services. In particular, participants spent more time in public transport usage and walking during the reward-based period. Our results indicate that rewards could increase individuals’ time spent in public transport usage and walking by about 21 min and 14 min per day respectively. Furthermore, it is found that public transport users were mostly motivated by rewards, while car users and walkers were not motivated towards cycling. Finally, the results indicate that Birmingham’s users were more motivated than Vienna’s participants, as public transport usage increased by about 209 min per week in Birmingham vs. 74 min per week in Vienna. Similar patterns of increase in the cities were observed for walking, while some population groups in Vienna were found insensitive to the prospect of earning rewards for using sustainable transport modes.