Incentivizing Responsible Commuting

Google Tech Talk July 27, 2009 ABSTRACT "It Pays To Do The Right Thing: Incentivizing Responsible Commuting," presented by Balaji Prabhakar. Frustrating traffic jams are well-known to commuters. Quite surprising is just how expensive road congestion can be: A study by the Texas Transportation Institute estimates that $78.2 billion was incurred in time and fuel costs in the U.S. in 2005. Increased vehicular traffic also means more pollution and parking problems. To combat these staggering costs and undesirable effects of congestion, cities like London, Singapore and Stockholm have introduced congestion charging. We describe a different approach to combat road congestion: Rather than just charging congestors, we advocate paying money to decongestors. The goal is to wean commuters away from congestion-causing behavior by incentivizing them to commute at less congested times. This approach is validated in a 6 month pilot deployment at Infosys Technologies, Bangalore. Over 14,000 commuters were part of the pilot and over 9,000 commuted to work at off-peak hours, up from about 4,200 before the pilot's launch. We are particularly interested in applying the incentive approach in other, wider contexts; for example, to encourage off-peak commuting in public transportation systems and to private vehicles. Balaji Prabhakar is a faculty member in the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. His research interests are in designing algorithms for Computer Networks. Recently, he has been interested in Societal Networks: networks vital for society's functioning, such as transportation and recycling systems. He has been a Terman Fellow at Stanford University and a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has received the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Erlang Prize, the Rollo Davidson Prize, and delivered the Lunteren Lectures. He has received several of best paper awards for his research on data networks.