IDLE (Incentivising Drivers to Lessen Emissions)

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We deserve clean air. Air pollution contributes to global warming and environmental damage, harms our health, and reduces our quality of life. Environmental policymakers across Europe and the world are increasingly focusing on how to tackle these costs but have found progress hard to come by. The most significant contributors to air pollution play significant economic roles, and curtailing activity presents its own problems. We are proposing a simple solution which not only avoids imposing costs on economically significant industries, but which actively saves them money while cutting pollution. Some of the largest contributors to air pollution in our cities are vehicles. While some of these emissions are an inevitable consequence of doing business, many result from user inefficiencies such as leaving engines idling. We have experience in tackling these behavioural inefficiencies. In trials with Virgin Atlantic Airways, we were able to generate significant reductions in fuel consumption (15%) and self-reported job satisfaction (Gosnell et al., 2018) by offering pilots charitable incentives linked to their fuel consumption. Building upon this research, we are currently developing Signol - a software product which will provide pilots with personalised feedback and targets for fuel use. IDLE (Incentivising Drivers to Lessen Emissions) – our next product - will take a novel approach to tackling the fuel efficiency of large vehicles. IDLE will combine a cloud-based platform, telematic data analytics, econometrics, and behavioural science to deliver incentives and targets which work for the vehicle drivers, operatives, and fuel managers. We have already obtained the written support of two of the UK’s largest construction firms, and believe that we will quickly be able to demonstrate the value of our approach. Our initial analysis demonstrates significant value from this approach, which has not been realised yet. To this end, we are proposing an 8 week feasibility study with Highways England and two construction companies. This would explore issues around data transfer, access, and ownership, and would also allow us to examine which behaviours (like engine idling) we wish to change, the incentive structures currently offered to operators, the role of subcontractors, and which communication channels are available to us. At the end of the study, we intend to design a full randomised control trial for testing our new solution in the field.