Despite saving hundreds of dollars and even making new friends, none of the people who agreed to ditch their car for this Brisbane experiment wanted to go car-free permanently. This is why.
Unlike most existing transport research, which has employed surveys or observations, this study applied an intervention—i.e., a deliberate action or treatment introduced by the researchers to examine its effects on participants. An intervention involves actively changing a variable (such as car use) to assess its impact. In this case, we asked ten participants in each city to live car-free for twenty days. The purpose of the intervention was twofold:
Study the process of change itself. We examined the reasons why participants decided to partake in the study, what challenges they faced, how they coped with those challenges, and what factors contributed to successful change.
Evaluate the effectiveness of the financial incentives that we provided. Were they sufficient to induce permanent change?
Going car-free: an interventional study in Australia and Saudi Arabia