Tradable Driving Rights: New behavioral approaches to investigate a new travel demand tool?

The concept of Tradable Driving Rights (TDR), as a travel demand management tool, has received increasing attention over the last years. Because of the rising negative effects of road traffic on the one hand and the firm opposition to powerful measures such as road pricing and rationing on the other hand, a growing number of policymakers and researchers see TDR as a favorable alternative. Most of the studies published on TDR have explored viable TDR scheme designs from a theoretic perspective or have modeled traffic patterns under different TDR assumptions from a mathematical perspective. What is missing at the moment are studies that investigate the individual behaviors under TDR schemes. To provide some starting points, in this paper the authors discuss to what extent the TDR concept differs from more traditional pricing and rationing measures and how TDR as a measure will activate different behavioral mechanisms, largely inspired by findings from behavioral economy and psychology. The authors bring these mechanisms together in an integrative framework and describe some promising avenues for empirical studies on travel behavior under TDR.