Encouraging socially considerate behavior in green travel: A field experiment with shared bicycles

Dockless shared micro-mobility promotes climate neutrality, offering new modes of public transportation services and fostering the utilization of traditional public transportation by facilitating last-mile commuting. However, poor parking by users disrupts pedestrian pathways, obstructs access to public transit stations, and creates congestion in urban environments. In a field experiment, we test the effectiveness of providing social norm information under different framing (positive vs negative) and presentation modes (text vs pictorial) on promoting orderly parking. Placards with social norm information are placed in heavy bicycle parking areas at a university campus during randomly selected time intervals, and the resulting quality of parking behavior is observed via video footage. Both textual and pictorial reminders with positively framed social norms effectively increase the likelihood of parking in the proper areas and with orderly placement. However, we find little to no evidence indicating the effectiveness of textual information with negatively framed norms. Our findings show that providing information-based reminders about local social norms, particularly with positive framing, can successfully encourage socially considerate behavior in the green transportation domain.