Unveiling the heterogeneity of commuters’ travel mode change in different cities and their sensitivity to incentives

Personalized incentive-based strategies that aim at encouraging commuters to shift their travel modes to public transit modes have long been supposed to release road congestion and promote green travel. However, previous studies didn’t explore the heterogeneity of how incentives change commuters’ travel mode choice in different cities or their sensitivity to different types of incentives. To address this gap, we propose a two-stage analysis framework to categorize cities based on the willingness of commuters in different cities to change their travel modes and further analyze the differences in commuters’ sensitivity to various types of incentives. The results indicate that the perceived value of commuters for the same incentives in different categories of cities is remarkably different. The willingness of commuters to use public transit modes after the implementation of incentives is not significantly correlated to the level of economic development of cities. These results could generate significant implications for formulating differentiated and personalized incentives to increase the commuters’ willingness to travel by public transit modes in different types of cities.