2025/11/12 by Bing Liu, Yuan Liao, Liu, Bing +22
Engineering · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Certification #Greenhouse gas #Incentive #Incentive program #Psychological intervention #Public transport #Scale (ratio) #TRIPS architecture #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Travel behavior #Urban Transport and Accessibility #Vehicle emissions and performance #stat.AP
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.09237
openalex publication_date 2025/11/12 · openalex created_date 2025/11/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Digital carbon incentives are increasingly used to promote low-carbon travel, but city-scale evidence on their behavioral and carbon-accounting implications remains limited. We evaluated a carbon-incentive program on a Beijing Mobility-as-a-Service platform using 4.82 billion trips from 2.96 million users over 13 months, with a matched panel of enrolled and non-enrolled users. Enrollment was associated with a 20.3 percentage-point increase in the monthly low-carbon travel share, with pre-enrollment trends remaining near zero across event-study tests. A random-forest accounting scenario trained on pre-enrollment data implied a 1.8% citywide decline in gasoline-car trips and annual reductions of 94,353 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 5.7% of the certified reductions traded in Beijing's carbon market in 2023. This estimate is model-dependent rather than a directly observed or causally identified program effect. Larger program-associated responses were concentrated in areas with greater transit access. These results show that carbon-market-financed digital incentives can support measurable low-carbon travel responses at the city scale.