• What mobility decisions do people take under the constraint of an individual mobility budget?
• How does it affect different groups of people?
• Can a mobility budget increase awareness and personal responsibility that leads to behavioural change?

This Living Lab contributes to understanding how Individual Mobility Budget can effectively increase awareness and lead to behavioural change. It furthermore formulates recommendations on how to implement an Individual Mobility Budget.

Inspiring Community Effort

How do different groups of people react to the introduction of an Individual Mobility Budget? This question lies at the core of the Viennese Living Lab. It tests if and how people would behave under the constraints of an Individual Mobility Budget. This is done through field tests with a group of open-minded volunteers recruited from residents of Seestadt Aspern, a large urban development area in the northeast of Vienna.

The introduction of Individual Mobility Budgets would bring about profound shifts in individuals’ lives. The Vienna Living Lab thus aims to explore how people would navigate such changes. What mobility decisions do people take if constrained by an individual mobility budget? How would such a budget affect different groups of people? And, can such a budget trigger heightened awareness and personal responsibility, ultimately fostering behavioural change?

In cooperation the partner aspern-mobil LAB, the MyFairShare Living Lab Vienna enrolled volunteers from Seestadt Aspern, the largest urban expansion district in Vienna, to assess how Individual Mobility Budgets affect citizens on a local level. This population was chosen to work with people who may be more open to adapting their mobility behaviour and are (supposedly) more sustainable in their mobility choices compared to the average Viennese citizen. Over the course of one month, participants were divided into three test groups, experiencing different scenarios of Individual Mobility Budgets.

Equipped with a mobility tracking app (Wegefinder), volunteers track their personal mobility patterns, while carbon emissions are calculated based on distance and transportation mode. Every week, participants receive an update informing them about their personal carbon emissions and how they are situated in comparison to different scenarios for individual mobility budgets. Successively, they are confronted with increasingly tight personal carbon budgets that relate to the years 2023, 2030 and 2040 along the Austrian emission reduction pathway, urging them to keep their transport carbon emissions within the respective individual mobility budget.

As the experiment’s conclusion, a consensus conference will be held. Here, participants share their experiences from the experiment and collectively develop policy recommendations for an Individual Mobility Budget. Guided by expert input and moderation from researchers, participants aim to reach a consensus on how an Individual Mobility Budget could be implemented and discuss several aspects of how such policy instrument should be designed in order to reduce carbon emissions in a fair way.

By combining various methods, the Vienna Living Lab contributes to an understanding of how Individual Mobility Budgets can increase awareness and may lead to behavioural change. The experimental approach generates important insights for policy recommendations to move forward with conceptualizing Individual Mobility Budgets.