Technologies in Transportation Planning and Management

As part of achieving sustainable cities, reducing car use has been a main target in transportation planning and policy. Transportation demand management (TDM) measures such as Park and Ride participation and carpooling have been introduced in the last two decades. However, these measures do not work effectively unless travelers themselves identify their car use as an impediment to achieving sustainable cities. In this context, encouragement of travelers to become involved in environmentally friendly travel patterns is a promisingly effective policy measure to reduce car use. Jones (2003) called such approaches “soft measures” in mobility management. The effectiveness of this method has been demonstrated by previous research in, for example, Individualized Marketing (Brög 1998), Travel Smart (Department of Transport, Western Australia 2000), Travel Blending (Rose and Ampt 2001) and the Travel Feedback Program (TFP) (Taniguchi et al. 2003). These behavior modification programs are referred to as travel feedback programs (Fujii and Taniguchi 2005). In these programs, the first step is obtaining information on travel diaries from participants to diagnose their travel patterns. The programs then provide the participants with information on the CO₂ emissions they produced, and on public transport as an alternative mode, and/or advise people how to reduce car use based on their current travel patterns. Some programs ask the participants to make behavioral plans (Fujii and Taniguchi 2005). Existing research in Western countries reports that aggregate car use of the participants reduced by about 10–20% after participation in the programs (Fujii and Taniguchi 2006). In Japan, interest in these programs has been increasing. In particular, the Travel Feedback Program has been implemented in many cities (Japan Society of Civil Engineers 2005; Fujii and Taniguchi 2006).