Beyond Car Ownership is a project jointly led by LSE Cities’ Executive Director Philipp Rode and Andreas Hermann, Director of the Institute for Customer Insight at the University of St. Gallen and visiting professor at LSE Cities. With the aim of better understanding how car ownership in cities can be reduced, the research seeks to investigate the hidden determinants underpinning car ownership in cities and explore whether and how these can be influenced by policy makers.
The research brings together a wide range of disciplines to enable a novel approach to policy and behavioural transport studies, integrating insights from behavioural psychology, customer research, urban governance, and transport policy. The ongoing pilot study focuses on gaining preliminary understandings of car ownership in London and urban Switzerland and attempts to measure emotional attachments to different transport modes in both study areas. The aim is to use these insights to form policy instruments to alter subjective attitudes towards private cars, improve the attractiveness of sustainable transportation modes, and ultimately, disrupt patterns of car purchasing.
Find out more information about the Beyond Car Ownership research project here.