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How To Solve Traffic Jams by Jonas Eliasson

Road congestion exists in cities around the world and is a complex social problem. When trying to solve such problems, the best approach is to create incentives that nudge people towards better behaviors rather than mandating specific actions. Stockholm introduced congestion charges in 2006, which reduced traffic by 20% on the first day. Although initially unpopular, over time people adapted to the new framework and now 70% support keeping the charges. By subtly nudging travel decisions each day, congestion pricing changed behaviors and travel patterns in ways people did not consciously realize.

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50 views

How To Solve Traffic Jams by Jonas Eliasson

Road congestion exists in cities around the world and is a complex social problem. When trying to solve such problems, the best approach is to create incentives that nudge people towards better behaviors rather than mandating specific actions. Stockholm introduced congestion charges in 2006, which reduced traffic by 20% on the first day. Although initially unpopular, over time people adapted to the new framework and now 70% support keeping the charges. By subtly nudging travel decisions each day, congestion pricing changed behaviors and travel patterns in ways people did not consciously realize.

Uploaded by

Deibert Ratag
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to solve traffic jams by Jonas Eliasson

Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon. It exists in basically all of the cities all around
the world, in different cities like the typical European cities, with a dense urban core, good
public transportation mostly, not a lot of road capacity, also in the American cities, with lots
of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation, and in the emerging
world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed
but often with a very dense urban core. Road congestion is an example of a complex social
problem.

When you try to solve really complex social problem, the right thing to do is most of the time
to create the incentives. You don’t plan the details, and people will figure out what to do, how
to adapt to this new framework.

Stockholm is one of the cities in the world that faces the road congestion. And someone came
up with the idea to combat road congestion by applying congestion charges.

Congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm in 2006 as a seven-month trial, followed


by a referendum where a majority voted in favor of the charges. This led to the reintroduction
of congestion charges in August 2007.

The first day with the congestion charges was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear
from rush hours. This is a fairly huge figure. But there is still 80 percent of the traffic. This 80
percent left of the problem is wrong because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon,
meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to
increase really, really rapidly. But fortunately, it also works the other way around. If you can
reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might
think.

When congestion pricing were introduced in 2006, people were fiercely against it. Seventy
percent of the population didn’t want this. But what happened when the congestion charges
were there is not what you would expect, people changed. 70 percent of the population in
Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be freed.

Based on the interview survey we can say that travel patterns are much less stable than you
might think. Each day, people make new decisions, and people change and the world changes
around them, and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from
rush hour car driving in a way that people don’t even notice. They are not even aware of this
themselves. People are not even aware that they have changed, and they honestly believe
that they have liked this all along.

This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problem, and when you do
that, you shouldn’t try to tell people how to adapt. You should just nudge them in the right
direction. And if you do it right, people will actually embrace the change, and if you do it right,
people will even like it.

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