UPBEAT: User-centred Pro-active Behavioural Economics Acting on Travel

Our excessive dependence on motorised road transport imposes significant economic costs on society, such as congestion, pollution and physical inactivity and the ill health caused by it. UPBEAT is an app designed to combine personalised travel sensing, open city transport datasets and behavioural science to deliver user-centred feedback to commuters to help remove the friction of travel choice and to understand how commuters can access better modes of travel. Our key objectives are to: -
1. Help users to change travel choices from socially inefficient modes of travel (i.e. single use car journeys) to more socially acceptable methods. Such changes will in turn lead to improvements in air quality, health, personal finance, well-being, pollution and demands upon traffic services such as roads and parking
2. Understand the power of nudges and incentives in changing travel behaviour.
3. Construct a commercially viable and replicable product that removes the friction costs for travel options, which can be transferable to virtually any organisation.