Tripod: Sustainable Travel Incentives with Prediction, Optimization, and Personalization

This paper presents Tripod, a smartphone-based system to influence individual real-time travel decisions by offering information and incentives to optimize system-wide energy performance. When starting a trip, travelers can access Tripod's personalized menu via a smartphone app and are offered incentives in the form of tokens for a variety of energy-reducing travel options in terms of: route, mode, ride-sharing, departure time, driving style and actual trip making. Options are presented with information to help travelers understand the energy and emissions consequences of their choices. By accepting and executing a specific travel option, a traveler earns tokens that depend on the system-wide energy savings created, encouraging them to consider not only their own energy cost, but also the impact of their choice on the system. Tokens can then be redeemed for services and goods from participating vendors and transportation agencies. Little new infrastructure would need to be created - millions of travelers already have smartphones capable of meeting the needs of the system. This proposed incentive-based system can be implemented for a fraction of the cost of infrastructure-heavy projects, and at little or no cost to local, state and federal government. The authors also showcase the current state of development of Tripod with numerical experiments for the Downtown Boston (Boston Proper) area and for a limited set of incentivized choices, with energy savings between 3 to 8%.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40 Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting.
• Authors:
  • Azevedo, Carlos Lima
  • Seshadri, Ravi
  • Gao, Song
  • Atasoy, Bilge
  • Akkinepally, Arun
  • Christofa, Eleni
  • Zhao, Fang
  • Trancik, Jessika
  • Ben-Akiva, Moshe
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Advanced traveler information systems; Energy conservation; Incentives; Mode choice; Real time information; Route choice; Smartphones
• Geographic Terms: Boston (Massachusetts)
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Energy; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01660458
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-06769
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 20 2018 9:28AM