Urban housing markets
Urban transport
11.00 – 11.30 Characteristics of Low-Parking Developments in Gothenburg, Sweden
– Devon McAslan & Frances Sprei
Municipalities in Sweden and internationally have begun to reform their parking policies to meet the need for sustainable mobility. A common approach to parking reform is to develop flexible parking standards, which can reduce parking based on a number of factors. To achieve lower parking norms, the City of Gothenburg (Sweden) uses mobility agreements which developers can opt into to provide mobility solutions for up to 10-years in exchange for reduced parking norms.
This presentation will explore the variation in mobility agreements and the different mobility solutions that developers choose to use. The research is based on data collected from the City of Gothenburg on close to 100 properties with mobility agreements that are complete or in various stages of development. We also include some data from a survey with property developers with properties that have mobility agreements and where residents have moved in. We examine the spatial variation in terms of neighborhood amenities, transit accessibility and other factors in relation to the mobility services provided. This is an ongoing project to evaluate mobility agreements and the results presented here are initial and in preliminary stages.
Devon McAslan is a postdoctoral researcher at Chalmers University of Technology. His research explores planning and policy issues related to sustainable mobility. Research areas include sustainable transportation systems and the built environment, parking reform, car free housing developments, e-bikes and cargo bikes, smart mobility and autonomous vehicles, and governance of smart cities.
Frances Sprei is a professor of sustainable mobility at Chalmers University of Technology. Her research assess economic, political, technical, and behavioral aspects of different personal mobility options, such as alternative fueled vehicles and electric vehicles as well as innovative mobility forms such as car sharing and ride sharing.
11.30 – 12.00 The effect of tailored information for the uptake of car sharing, evidence from a field experiment in Oslo
– Alice Ciccione
As a sustainable transition, carsharing can be beneficial along each of the sustainability dimensions: the environmental, the economic, the social. Research shows that carsharing may imply less car use, reducing emissions and the number cars on the roads compared to private car ownership. Moreover, carsharing is a more rational and efficient solution than car ownership for a large part of the population: it implies fewer cars lower fixed costs, and it provides an easy and affordable access to car for those who only need it occasionally or cannot afford to buy a car. In Norway, recent research results highlighted a general lack of information around carsharing.
This study implements a large-scale randomized controlled trial in the field where an information nudge is sent to about 20 000 car owners who have an old and underutilized car and might benefit to go car-less. A link was sent to a calculator website that provides personalized information regarding the current cost of owning a car compared to the potential cost of using a car-sharing service to cover their travel needs.
Results show that the number of new car-sharing users is higher in the treated postcodes compared to the control ones. A treatment effect of about 14% is observed for one of the major car-sharing companies in Oslo, indicating that the intervention caused 500-600 new additional members in the treated postcodes over a 13-month period. Hence this type of information provision shows potential to be a meaningful and effective policy instrument.
*TØI, Institute of transport Economic, Oslo, Norway
Alice Ciccone is senior research economist and works at TØI in the department of Safety, Security, and Behavior. She carries out research in behavioral and experimental economics focusing mostly on sustainable transport. She applies different quantitative and experimental methods to study transport and environmental policies for active transport, car usage and ownership, car sharing and new technologies.
Ciccone was recently awarded of a personal research grant for “young talents for ground breaking research” From the Norwegian Research Council (FRIPRO). In 2017, she was affiliate researcher at UCL (University College London) and University of Greenwich (UoG). Previously, Ciccone worked as associate in the Behavioral Economics and Data Science Unit (BDU) at the Financial Conduct Authority (London, UK). She defended her PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo in 2015, and was Chazen Visiting scholar at Columbia University in 2014 (New York, USA).