Traffic jams: the bane of motorized society.
Drivers in the United States burned through 3 billion gallons of fuel and spent almost 7 billion additional hours stuck in their vehicles in the past year thanks to traffic congestion. This is according to the 2015 Urban Mobility Scorecard by Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) and INRIX, which put the financial hit at $960 per commuter, or a total of $160 billion to the American economy.
Not all is lost. Technology may soon have a solution—or at least a salve. The state of Virginia, for example, is implementing an Active Traffic Management (ATM) system for a stretch of Interstate 66 that is infamous for traffic congestion. To be completed by end of this year, the ATM will use a combination of technologies—cameras, sensors and electronic message signs—to warn drivers not only about accidents or blocked lanes up ahead, but also about when to slow down. The goal is to ease congestion and reduce accidents.
And not surprisingly, there’s now an app with the same goal in mind. Launched in 2014, Metropia aims to cut congestion by rewarding users for adjusting their travel times and routes. By encouraging incremental shifts in how we commute, Metropia and its government backers hope to trigger larger, long-term behavioral change.
Traffic and Rewards
Metropia’s founder and CEO, Yi-Chang Chiu, is an associate professor of transportation engineering at the University of Arizona and has worked on congestion mitigation programs. He was inspired to create the app by Disney World’s FastPass+ service, which enables visitors to cut down their wait time for an attraction by reserving a less-popular arrival time. The staggered approach helps the park manage lines and waits during peak times.
Chiu thought: Why not apply this model to road traffic?
“It’s a congestion-management tool that incentivizes and provides people with information to make better decisions about their commute and make small shifts in behavior,” says Mia Zmud, vice president of Ecosystem Partnerships for Metropia. The app uses predictive algorithms that harness Metropia’s own user data and traffic data to forecast traffic throughout the day.
How it works: After downloading the Metropia app, the user plans her trips for the day, entering current location and destination, just as in a navigation app. The app then crunches the numbers to suggest a departure time, a route that avoids heavy traffic, the amount of minutes the trip will take and the arrival time.
The app will start monitoring traffic conditions two hours before the user’s scheduled departure time and alert the user to any change in arrival time. It will also send a reminder 10 minutes before the trip starts.
By taking the suggested route and departure time—verified through GPS tracking—the user earns points to use toward gift cards to Amazon, Target, Starbucks or local merchants, or for music downloads.
The Metropia app also calculates and tracks how much carbon dioxide the user has saved by taking the more efficient routes. For every 100 pounds of carbon dioxide a user has saved, Metropia will plant a tree (in partnership with the nonprofit tree-planting group American Forests).
Users can use points to plant additional trees or donate the points to a cause. So there are both prizes and environmental wins. Beyond the incentives, though, the makers of the app hope users buy into the bigger picture.
“You’re always going to be stuck with the traffic that you have right then and there,” says Zmud. “If you plan ahead, you have more options. That’s probably the biggest challenge—to [get users to] see the value of planning ahead their commute so they can pick the best time for their travel, to get them there quicker, and reward them with more points.”
Carpooling, Too
Metropia recently added to its app a feature called, DUO, or Driving Up Occupancy, that rewards users for carpooling. It confirms that users are carpooling by analyzing their GPS coordinates, making sure that they are traveling along the same route at the same speed and time. For using DUO, carpoolers—drivers and passengers—earn points and a chance to win additional points by spinning a “prize wheel” in the app. It is available only in the Austin, Texas, market for now.
The app has “thousands” of active users who vary by market, Zmud says. It launched in Austin and Tucson, Ariz., with a beta test planned for El Paso, Texas, this spring, and the company plans to expand to New York and Houston.
For each new market, Metropia sets up an “ecosystem of mobility” that lets government agencies provide jumpstart funding, local employers promote its use, merchants provide incentives and drivers help address traffic congestion by using the app.
Merchants who partner with Metropia, by providing incentives such as gift cards, can have their store locations placed on maps used by the app. Because Metropia tracks users’ commutes, it can also coordinate push messaging for its corporate partners.
“We know if someone every day is going by a convenience store at a specific time, so we can send a push message and say, ‘Stop in Circle K this week and get $1 off a hot dog,’ ” Zmud says. This can also include encouraging users to visit on a specific day or time.
Metropia is just beginning to analyze user data, but it is already seeing “small shifts” in users’ driving behavior, such as changing typical departure times. And for now, these small shifts are just fine. “Even if you shift a few minutes, you get one more car out of traffic, leaving 15 minutes earlier,” says Zmud. “You give small ways to [create] incremental changes, which will eventually lead toward making better decisions over time, so that we slowly get them toward making bigger changes, such as carpooling. It’s all about incremental steps.”
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