Promoting considerate parking behavior in dockless bike-sharing: An experimental study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2020.08.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Test the effectiveness of three nudges on promoting orderly parking in a field experiment.

  • Disguise the experiment as a game to conceal the experimental purpose.

  • Warnings and monetary incentive are both effective in the experiment.

  • Results yield novel implications on how to deal with disorderly parking.

Abstract

Dockless shared bicycles have become a popular mode of transportation for city dwellers in China. Despite its convenience, the dockless feature also creates new challenges, as users often park shared bicycles in a disorderly fashion, which places a burden on both city management and business operations. In a randomized field experiment, subjects receive general information via one of three interventions to improve orderly parking: being informed about the social norm, receiving a warning message, or being offered a monetary incentive. The results suggest that the warning message and monetary incentive shift users’ behavior compared with the social norm intervention. Users who received warning messages were 18.0% more likely to park in an orderly fashion, and users who received a monetary incentive were 25.2% more likely. This study demonstrates that behavioral incentives may be an effective tool to address a common issue with this form of transportation.

Introduction

Shared transportation is reshaping the landscape of urban transportation. For instance, as of 2018, ride-sharing giant Uber had completed 5 billion trips globally1. In China, daily active users for the bike-sharing service MoBike, one of the biggest bike-sharing companies, averaged 8.65 million2. Bike-sharing has become one of China’s three public travel modes, with buses and subways. This innovation not only offers convenience but also poses new challenges. Usage etiquette is a prevalent issue, owing to its impact on both the user’s experience and business operations. Some users park bicycles at any available location, even if it is unsuitable because it violates a pedestrian right-of-way, obstructs metro station entrances or exits, or causes inconvenience for subsequent shared bicycle users.

While more regulatory efforts are called for to address disruptive user behavior, in this study, we examine the effectiveness of behavioral nudges and monetary incentives for improving user etiquette. Our study’s context is users’ parking behavior when using dockless bike-sharing. Providers of these services usually deploy their fleets at hotspots across a city, such as subway stations, parks, or shopping malls. Users can locate an available bike with a mobile app, unlock and ride it, park it in any permitted area when finished, and pay with the app. In this way, users help spread available bikes to more locations. Compared with its docked counterpart, dockless service can offer users better bike availability and trip flexibility. However, the dock-less feature makes disorderly parking possible, and many incorrectly parked shared bicycles occupy public spaces and can even obstruct bus stops3. City managers must sometimes confiscate such bicycles to maintain order4. A similar problem occurred in Amsterdam, where dockless bike-sharing was banned in September 20175.

In this study, we conducted a randomized field experiment to assess the effect of three measures—social norms, warning messages, and monetary incentives—on orderly parking. We recruited 126 regular bike-sharing service users at Beijing Jiaotong University and randomized them into one control and three treatment groups. To avoid biasing their parking behavior, we disguised the experiment as a “joy ride” for a knowledge contest on campus. Halfway through participants’ rides, we stopped them and administered the interventions in disguise. At the end of their rides, we observed, from a concealed location, whether each participant had parked their bike in the permitted area.

We collected data on 122 parking instances and participants’ demographics. After coding the parking instances as orderly or disorderly, we performed logistic and probability regressions to evaluate the treatments’ effectiveness. The results show that both the warning message and monetary incentive significantly increased the probability that participants would park their bicycles in an orderly manner, while the social norm message was only effective for male users.

This study contributes to the transportation literature in three ways. Methodologically, our novel revealed-preference-based field experimental approach shows a high level of internal validity in studying socially disapproved/undesirable behavior. Substantively, we study an emerging issue in a new transportation mode that has received only scant attention. Lastly, our work contributes to the extensive literature on behavioral nudging by reporting observations from urban transportation.

Section snippets

Research methods

We use field experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions on users’ parking behavior. Field experiments are a way to collect behavioral data in a natural environment, with controlling and manipulating research variables and partially controlling for other influential factors (Harrison and List 2004). Compared with simulation experiments, organizers can directly apply intervention measures and observe shifts in each subject’s travel behavior in a natural setting (Dixit et al. 2017

Experimental design

We chose randomized controlled trials for their high internal validity, which marks a methodological departure from an extensive empirical literature that uses stated-preference surveys (Ingvardson and Nielsen, 2019, Nordlund et al., 2018, Wang et al., 2018) or laboratory experiments (Yao et al., 2019, Sunitiyoso et al., 2011) to study travel behavior. Despite the merits of the stated-preference approach, the gap between thoughts and actual behaviors when participants complete questionnaires is

Results

A total of 122 subjects completed the experiments, giving us 122 valid observations on parking behavior. Of these observations, 31 were from the CG group, 31 from the NG, 30 from the WG, and 30 from the MG. We present subjects’ demographic information and their distribution in Table 1. Because the experimental subjects were all college students, most (89.34%) were between 19 and 24 years old. Our questionnaire also captured subjects’ demographics, as well as their familiarity with and frequency

Discussion

Disorderly parking hinders the rapid development of bike-sharing services. Our research provides managerial and policy implications for bike-sharing companies and regulators seeking to promote orderly parking behavior.

Our results propose two effective interventions. First, we provide an evidence that monetary incentive of CNY 2 (USD 0.29) is effective for triggering orderly parking behavior. One might worry that it is a financial burden for companies. Considering that the unit price of riding a

Conclusion

We study disorderly parking behavior of shared bicycles and design a novel field experiment with a high-level internal validity. Using a randomized field experiment, we examine three behavioral interventions for promoting orderly parking behavior. Our findings reveal that both warning messages and monetary rewards help to reduce disorderly parking. We hope that our findings that behavioral interventions are effective in addressing emerging issues in new transportation modes will spur new

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Duan Su: Methodology, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Visualization. Yacan Wang: Conceptualization, Data curation, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Project administration. Nan Yang: Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing. Xianghong Wang: Validation.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe (NSFCJPI UE) (‘U-PASS’, 71961137005), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (grant number 2018JBWB003), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 71671282). Any remaining errors are ours.

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