Mumbai’s suburban rail network, the city’s lifeline, ferries 6.6 million passengers each day on 2435 trains, against its original design capacity of 1800 passengers per nine-car train. Despite these numbers Mumbai is the 5th most congested city in the world with an average peak hour speed of 5 km/h (Alam and Ahmed, 2013). The Mumbai Metro was conceived to reduce road and sub-urban rail congestion while promising comfort, safety and greater connectivity across the city.
The success of a metro depends on its ridership; in India, more often than not, metros have been underutilised, undermining their viability. There are several structural and behavioural barriers that prevent metro uptake, primarily, poor last-mile connectivity and absence of a complete interconnected network.
These issues aside, there are also cultural norms and perceptions that hinder metro ridership such as the amount of effort involved in getting to and from a metro station, lack of safety, and status of the metro. Low ridership among private vehicle owners can be partially attributed to status bias because cars are associated with the upper class while metros are perceived as a mass-oriented transit catering to a low-income demographic. Moreover, misconceptions about service reliability create uncertainty about its utility.
To address these behavioural barriers, there is merit in exploring the use of behavioural interventions or ‘nudges.’ Behavioural economics offers an approach which combines economic analysis and behavioural insights to implement ‘nudges.’ A nudge is an intervention that influences behaviour by modifying the decision-making environment.
Behavioural strategies
Interventions to modify commute behaviour can be classified as structural, behavioural, or a mix of the two. Structural interventions entail alterations to the physical environment and physical choice architecture by changing road design, fuel pricing, and pedestrianisation of city centres. Behavioural treatments, which is the focus of this blog, on the other hand, target communities and people by modifying beliefs, and attitudes regarding behavioural alternatives or promoting self-regulation. They may involve providing feedback, nudges, allowing social comparisons, gamification and offering economic incentives. For instance, the Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (PMPML) has implemented nudges to promote public transport usage. Similarly, King County Metro in Seattle has used gamification to boost ridership by integrating loyalty rewards and points.
The Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (PMPML) designed behavioural nudges to promote sustainable transport to ‘nudge’ citizens to use public transport over private vehicles by positioning public transit as a more viable option economically and practically. The pilot programme involved 2 types of nudges: information and frequency.
The Information Nudge, aimed at improving signages at bus stops, and providing information about bus routes and frequency. The Frequency Nudge aimed at increasing frequency on identified routes from one every 30 mins to one every 15 mins for the duration of the experiment. The programme’s primary goal was to boost ridership on PMPML’s designated lines and Pune metros while enhancing the uptake of sustainable transport modalities. Although the ridership data after the pilot experiment is yet to be analysed, 53 percent respondents agreed to increase their bus usage frequency and 18% have agreed to use it frequently after the Information and Frequency nudge were implemented.
Furthermore, the programmeme will measure the effects of different nudges and identify the improvements in services that have been efficient. With this data the transport providers, in this case, PMPML and Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation Limited, can make well-informed decisions and concentrate on making the most effective changes. Hence, nudges have the potential to influence people to adopt public transit over private vehicles when ridership data is analysed and contextualised with respect to reach.
Gamification is a strategy rooted in behavioural economics that modifies the manner in which information is presented, causing significant changes in user behaviour. Providing information that the distance travelled, number of trips can be converted into loyalty points which can be redeemed as a discount for future trips is one such example. Research suggests that loyalty programmes activate the pleasure centres of our brain inspiring commitment to a particular behaviour as it leads to a reward. For instance, The King County Metro’s loyalty programme in Seattle yielded positive results, 85 percent of active users in the pilot interacted with the platform regularly to claim their points earned by completing transit-focused trips. Redemption volumes were promising, with 70 percent of active users redeeming their first reward within 24 hours of signing-up. Hence, by integrating gamification in transit systems, citizens can be incentivized to choose the metro.
Apart from behavioural and structural barriers, there are several factors of the built environment that influence metro ridership; these include, proximity to the city centre, shopping malls, days since the metro station is operational, and nearby bus stations. Addressing these factors would involve integrating principles of urban planning such as Transit Oriented Development (TOD) to make the environment conducive for metro uptake.
Increasing metro ridership in rapidly urbanising cities involves addressing behavioural and infrastructural barriers. By leveraging behavioural interventions we can reshape commuter perception and behaviour. These interventions can be integrated with urban planning principles to create last-mile connectivity and a user-friendly, comprehensive transit system.
Nidhi Dingrani is an intern at Artha Global.
Banner image source: Gencraft.
