incentives

This report assesses the potential use of express lane discounts as a driver of zero-emission vehicle adoption by testing the effectiveness of a range of discount scenarios. The researchers find that providing even very large discounts for express lane usage to zero-emission vehicles would only slightly increase vehicle sales but would make these lanes much less capable of serving their other purposes. As part of this project, an Excel tool was developed that allows users to test their own scenarios.

With rapid population growth and urban development, traffic congestion has become an inescapable issue, especially in large cities. Many congestion reduction strategies have been proposed in the past, ranging from roadway extension to transportation demand management programs. In particular, congestion pricing schemes have been used as negative reinforcements for traffic control. This project studies a different approach of offering positive incentives to drivers to take alternative routes.

Researchers at the University of Southern California developed a real-time, distributed algorithm for offering personalized incentives to individual drivers to make socially optimal routing decisions.

This project uses results from a cohort survey of electric vehicle owners in California conducted in 2019. The respondents of the survey are sampled from the pool of California Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP) recipients, and the CVRP is administered by the Center for Sustainable Energy & California Air Resources Board.