Research (1): from Supply-side to Demand-side Approach, from Economic Incentive to Social Incentive

Today, we are standing at a point of opportunity where we can really make a difference, or we let it go by. After several decades of focusing solely on economic development and enterprise competition, we've ignored the fundamental of life - the most precious and invaluable resources - the Mother Nature. On the other hand, during just about the same period, technological progress has become unprecedentedly powerful in its nature, and also social in its ability to make each other interconnected.

One of the biggest challenges, global warming, by its nature, is such a comprehensive crisis and risk that people on this planet will need to work out a bunch of solutions collaboratively or they will suffer from the irreversible catastrophe together. However, looking at today's government policies aimed to address this issue in the post Kyoto Protocol era, cooperation has been high on the agenda, but at a level so high that people consider it the government's job. What governments around the world are good at (and they are supposed to be, since basically those are quasi-monopoly businesses), is the supply management of all sorts of public services, transportation, energy, sewer and water and so on. As a result, the progress of emission reduction has been disappointing.

The focus has yet come to the ordinary people whose collective effort once reaches the tipping point could really make a shard difference in the situation. At this micro-level, most of the green innovation and creative programs have been initiated chiefly by private sectors and NGOs.

Regarding transportation, yes, there are a variety of transportation demand management (TDM) measures such as congestion pricing, toll road, and others urging people to change travel mode by means of economic incentive. Although, if well-schemed, it will definitely show positive effect on environment and congestion, this kind of economic-incentive-based measures is not tackling the problem directly, and it's often politically implausible. In other words, people are forced to change to green mode because of economic penalty. Drivers whose mode remains unchanged are subject to the structural change

TDM Measures by Incentive Types


The thing that is really in need of change is the environmental and social awareness. The former explains the physical capacity of the environment and the latter represents the fact that not only welfare, but also misery of each individual is interconnected.

There comes the idea of mobility management, defined by EPOMM (European Platform on Mobility Management)

Mobility Management (MM) is a concept to promote sustainable transport and manage the demand for car use by changing travellers's attitudes and behaviour. At the core of Mobility Management are soft measures like information and communication, organising services and coordinating activities of different partners. Soft measures most often enhance the effectiveness of hard measures within urban transport (e.g., new tram lines, new roads and new bike lanes). Mobility Management measures (in comparison to hard measures) do not necessarily require large financial investments and may have a high benefit-cost ratio.

In other words, Mobility Management resorts to the real problem of the crisis. As the strategy changed from economic incentive (people don't want to get fined)to moral incentive (people don't want to do something they consider wrong), related policies also started focusing on the building of awareness, such as marketing campaigns, car-pooling, par-and-ride, and so on. Those measures are more encouraging than forcing; that is, drivers whose mode remains unchanged are not affected. Most of the measures and programs involve in some sorts of information exchange and interaction between travelers and service providers.

However, because the choice of social dilemma between public transportation and private vehicles is the fundamental source of emission of transportation sector, I argue that social collaboration is the key to the crisis. At the micro-level, one by one, inch by inch, social collaboration (therefore pro-social behavior) is to be built via the help of technology.

(to be continued..)