INTERVIEW - Transport for Humans
BEHAVEN — Hi Pete, it’s great to have you here! Could you please introduce yourself?
PETE DYSON — Sure! I'm Pete Dyson and I spent ten years working at Ogilvy in their behavioural science practice. Then last year I moved to the Department for Transport of the UK Government Transport Ministry, where for over the past two years I've helped set up a behavioural science team and worked on topics such as the response to coronavirus, sustainable travel, and behaviour change for emerging transport technologies (like EVs and E-scooters). I've recently published a book called ‘Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?’ with my previous colleague from Ogilvy, Rory Sutherland.
Since you’ve recently joined the Department for Transport as a principal behavioural scientist, could you tell us what your job entails?
I joined the team last year when I was working on the book. The main idea was to understand how to design and better adapt transport by using the knowledge we have from academia and from published studies about how people think, feel and behave. We had the chance to set up the behavioural science team within the Department for Transport, which gave us the opportunity to work on a whole range of topics.
In my team, we think of behavioural science as the "so, what next?" that builds on the “what are people doing?” questions traditionally asked by social research. In transport, these are questions like how many people are taking the bus? When are they taking the train? How many more people are flying than they used to?
As behavioural scientists, we ask further “so, what next?” questions, for instance: knowing what we know, how might we affect more people to take up cycling? Or how might we get people that don't have a parking space to adopt an EV and where are they going to charge it on the public network?
Nice! From a behavioural science perspective, what makes transport behaviours different from other types of behaviours in your opinion?
There is an adage within the book when we speak of behaviour change: "it's not about transport, it's about people's lives." I am passionate about thinking of transport in a wider realm. It's more than just moving from A to B. It can be looked at in terms of what that transport is doing for the person. Is it a break from the house? Is it enabling a person to access work? Is it because they really need to see someone personally? Is it because of the thrill of seeing a new region?
What gets me really excited, though, is that the transport sector, unlike other sectors, is the only one looking at how people think about and experience time and space. How far away is it? Is it achievable to get to this place? How would I get there? How long would it feel? Solving all these problems enables people to do the slight miracle of actually getting themselves from A to B.
Quite early on in the book, you introduce the notion of an imaginary species, Homo transporticus. And you explain that in general, transport is designed for such beings as opposed to actual humans (Homo sapiens). Could you expand on this?
We thought that Homo transporticus was the best metaphor to land on what the problem is within the transport sector, and also the best metaphor to set up what the solution can be. People might be familiar with the concept of Homo economicus: a fictional species that the economics profession created some 200 years ago in order to have assumptions about how people would buy, choose things and behave. It assumes that people have perfect information about all the choices they might be confronted with, that they have all the trust they need to pick what they need to pick, that they do so with stable preferences. So, what they pick in one situation will be the same as what they pick in another situation.
Rory Sutherland and I extended that concept a bit further by creating a character called Homo transporticus, which is the fictitious species that transport planners develop. It is imbued with even more superpowers than Homo economicus and is based on the slightly cruel assumption that people know where they are in space, that they are constantly aware of all the routes that are available to them, and that they understand all the ticket options offered to them.
But all of these things, even to the transport planners themselves, are abundantly not true and that's the problem. As Homo sapiens, we do have some great superpowers that are smart adaptations, such as our ability to change when disruption occurs or to build habits that allow us to make better use of our time. But we also have shortcomings. We can't assume that people will remember a sign that they've seen 100 metres back. And we definitely can't assume that people's choices follow and conform to what operators might want them to choose.
One example is the narrow set of assumptions that many journey planners put forth as "where and when do you want to travel?” People don't always know this. They know that they might want to take a trip to Scotland, let's say, but they're flexible about when that would happen. There are also assumptions about people wanting the fastest and shortest journeys when that might not be the case. We address these problems and solutions through Homo transporticus, a character that emerges throughout the book.
In the book, you mention that events like the COVID crisis can trigger a 'fresh start effect'. Can you explain this effect and talk about how it can be used to encourage sustainable transport behaviours?
There's a lot of optimism about this idea and that's based partly on the layperson’s conception that only when the world changes around you do you change your behaviour. Several examples explain this further:
In the UK, during the time of the London underground strikes, people started travelling using different routes. Studies found that 1 in 20 of them actually stuck with the new bus and tube route that they found even after the end of the strikes.
After the London 2012 Olympics – which was a time when London workers were encouraged to reduce their use of transport to avoid traffic chaos – about 1 in 10 persons continued working from home, and the amount of flexible working in London increased by 50% compared to before the event.
A decade later, we're faced with the coronavirus. This could easily be a problem for public transport provision because we perhaps face a world with less public transport demand. In active travel, however, it is a great opportunity to embed new comparable skills and travel habits. One of the greatest fresh starts has surely been when the roads cleared out in the early part of 2020. The picture is quite messy as cycling is also a leisure activity and the need to travel has fluctuated so much but I think the best statistic is the simplest: 3% of all trips are now by bicycle when it used to be 2%.
These fresh starts are a blank canvas for people to build new habits and change behaviours, but it definitely needs some support and enablement. In the case of cycling, this can mean making safer infrastructure, but also other smaller things like people understanding new routes that work well for cycling.
You also talk about transport initiatives and mention Counter-Intuitive Transports (CITs). Could you tell us more about this?
Some transport initiatives and infrastructure improvements are intuitive, quite logical, and easy to present as the benefits are relatively clear. But sometimes, transport initiatives are counter-intuitive. Considering the counter-intuitiveness helps explain why some transport initiatives seem to be so controversial, polarising, or difficult to get across to people. Here are three examples:
A trial conducted in the London underground showed that having people standing on both sides of the escalator increases the overall carrying capacity of the escalator by about 30%. That’s because, on long escalators, the walking side is underused as more people stand, and even when lots do walk, they leave significant gaps between people in front and behind. However, this is a very hard point to get across to people. Travellers’ intuitions told them standing on both sides would be slower, so they got quite angry, sent letters of complaint and even pushed past one another. The operators even replaced staff with holograms to explain the message. Over several weeks the data was conclusive, but it was too late, Transport for London cancelled the pilot as they were unable to convince travellers it would work.
Low traffic neighbourhoods: the work in this regard focuses on creating ‘modal filters’ for car usage and changing the streetscapes which have previously prioritised car access in almost every area. It can be counter-intuitive when you think of areas being closed off to reduce traffic because it definitely leads to the firsthand assumption that traffic will simply be displaced. However, the research shows that traffic falls inside, outside and on the border of these zones – it is not merely displaced, even if that seems like the intuitive first thought. What happens, in reality, is people adapt to travelling at more off-peak times, travelling by public transport, walking and cycling, and making more efficient use of the trips they make. The University of Westminster has been brilliant at conducting thorough evaluations of these schemes.
Smart motorways: this means dynamically changing how the lanes are used, e.g., using all of the lanes with no ‘hard shoulder’, and it involves bringing the speed limit down from what would be the national speed limit. That’s counter-intuitive but slowing things down might actually make things faster and safer. These new motorways allow cars to go slightly closer together and reduce the more complex and chaotic braking that leads to traffic jams. It, therefore, increases some aspects of safety where the most common types of collisions become less likely.
The messengers of these ideas can't just be the engineers and transport designers. It needs more authority figures and credibility. The ways in which you might frame and explain the mechanism of how it works are also really important to bring people along the journey. So essentially it is less of transport being done to people and more of transport being done with people.
There is a striking estimation that 60% of all emission reductions needed to achieve net-zero by 2050 will demand non-mandatory behaviours that include adopting new technology, switching to green modes and reducing the use of highly polluting options. These are big challenges. How do you approach them as a behavioural scientist?
Yes, this statistic is a startling estimation by the UK’s Climate Change Committee. It shows that the era of emissions reductions purely happening in the background is surely over, and that simply changing the nature of, say, our electricity supply with no form of large-scale behaviour change is not realistic. In reality, behaviour change would incorporate something as straightforward as adopting new technologies to something more difficult, such as making tough choices about how we're going to invest in our homes.
Behaviour change needs to happen across different sectors. It is often misinterpreted that individual behaviour change simply includes travelling less when in reality it is a mix of different behaviours. For example, working from home might also lead you to look again at improving home insulation to reduce bills and improve comfort. Then being at home more might also mean you buy more groceries, so choices on sustainable diets and home recycling become even more significant. It might mean families need to own just one car and swap their second vehicle for a small electric car or sell it entirely.
Looking at the previous decades, the trend has remained that many new technologies don't just happen to people, they happen with them. This is important to consider as we address these behaviour change challenges.
Can you further explain the ABCs of transport for humans – more adapted, better balanced and increasing consciousness? What is the role of behavioural science in each of these three elements?
Firstly, the ‘A’ essentially reflects the idea that we should ‘Adapt’ our technologies to suit the bodies and brains that we have, not the other way around. A big part of that adaptation for behavioural science implies contributing to the vital research that looks at how people think when they're transported. For instance, does your familiarity with a trip make the return leg of the journey feel a bit quicker than the outward leg? This could mean that there is less time pressure on the way back and that this changes how you perceive time. This kind of research will largely contribute to how behavioural science can help adapt transport to the needs of people.
The B for ‘Balance’ paints a picture of a vision where everybody's transport choices can be balanced out with the different transport alternatives or non-transport alternatives available (connecting remotely or getting things delivered in a way that doesn't leave a big transport footprint). The balanced approach also goes deeper into people’s different transport diets. We need to understand people's travel behaviours at a more specific level. So, when does one use a bike, a bus or a train? And when would they want access to a car that they might rent or use? What are your second and third options for travelling? Because when everybody chooses the car, we end up with jams and no one seems to be particularly happy. A great future looks like a great investment in shared road space where more types of transport can coexist.
Finally, ‘C’ or ‘Consciousness’. This largely applies to transport planners and the greater consciousness of the human nature of their decisions - their biases could lead to over-optimism, averaging perspective, and groupthink. The transport sector needs to become conscious of the 19th and 20th-century assumptions about how people travel.
And I think the final nod on consciousness is to the individual to be more aware of their human nature. A better world does look like one where people embrace the human nature of their travel. For instance, I'm someone who’s not known to pick the quickest, most efficient route. There's a certain game or skill to that, but I've really benefited from understanding my own transport needs and knowing when I can take a slower route or understand things a bit better, or just question my own assumptions about how to get from A to B.
At the Department of Transport, do you use any particular tools or models to work on behaviour change challenges?
The COM-B framework has certainly become a common language or operating system, much like the Microsoft Windows of behaviour change. COM-B is a good starting point to understand the diagnosing of behaviour. However, we do strive to go a bit deeper than that. But there's never going to be a unique transport model of behaviour because each mode and behaviour is quite different. For the uptake of cycling, especially for some segments, the model you might want to use is risk perception, health determination or health perceptions because that's what’s underpinning it. At the same time, none of these would be an appropriate model for increasing bus usage. If you look at ticketing issues in fair ticketing, then models like ‘SCARF’ are really useful. This model looks at the five domains of the human social experience: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness. I do however think that the fairness element doesn't always come through thick and fast.
Consequently, sometimes we've advocated picking two models and running them side by side i.e., generating two simple maps, comparing and overlaying them to ensure high effectiveness. In the past year or two, I have used Triandis’ Theory of Interpersonal Behaviour which suggests that both intention and habits under the influence of facilitating conditions, result in performing a behaviour. Models have proved to be really helpful and it would be good to have people within the transport sector become familiar with models like COM-B in the future.
What are some good examples of interventions, campaigns or programs that have been successful at changing people's transport behaviour?
There's a lot of promise in the ‘moments of change’ work intervening at different life stages. It's definitely a different way of looking at transport and, because transport affects us throughout our whole lives, it never really becomes irrelevant at any point. So ‘moments of change’ means looking at people's life stages for instance when they're a teenager and they're getting more independent, when they're looking for a job, when they’re moving houses, or when they get children for the first time - this is a big moment in which the private car often solves the challenges of a young, new family. You then have retirement where people often lose car access or the ability to drive a vehicle as they downsize their home and potentially move elsewhere. There are some good examples of studies and work that's been done taking the ‘moments of change’ approach.
Initiatives from employers have also resulted in a dramatic uplift in the number of people cycling to work, workplace parking schemes, and a massive increase in public transport. Additionally, the inclusion of bike hangers on the streets enabling people to park their bikes outside, and changing the nature of the road priority by just switching one in every few parking spaces for a bike hangar are some of the interventions that help increase the uptake of cycling.
In addition to your book, what other sources of information on transport behaviours would you recommend to our readers?
There is an interesting book called ‘Traffic’ by Tom Vanderbilt, which is a bit of a seminal text on how people think about driving and traffic. It also happens to be a great contribution to the conversation on climate change. A lot of great work has been done by the Leeds University Institute for Transport Studies, specifically by Jillian Anable, on transport and transport planning decisions. A brilliant blog on the CREDS website does a wonderful job of summarizing research findings. Finally, Glenn Lyons in the UK has assembled a really useful toolkit on how to tackle uncertainty when planning for the future. It’s called FUTURES (Future Uncertainty Toolkit for Understanding and Responding to an Evolving Society) as hosted on the Mott Macdonald website and is available for the public. I’d recommend it for people wrestling with different future scenarios of whether the world might go - more digital, more local, more shared or more electric in terms of travel. We must be ready for multiple possible futures!
Transport for Humans, Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland: https://londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk/transport-for-humans
Traffic, by Tom Vanderbilt: https://tomvanderbilt.com/the-book
Jillian Anable, Leeds University Institute for Transport Studies: https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/transport/staff/915/professor-jillian-anable
CREDS: Transport & Mobility Research: https://www.creds.ac.uk/transport-mobility
FUTURES, by Glenn Lyons: https://www.mottmac.com/article/59966/futures-vision-led-planning-for-an-uncertain-world#?nocache=1642494813874