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Understanding the Cost of Driving Trips

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Driving is the second highest expense for the average American household. Yet few people know the total cost of owning and operating their vehicles, and most cannot estimate accurately how much a common driving trip (like a daily commute) costs. There are an increasing number of viable alternatives for personal transportation, such as car services (e.g. Uber, Lyft), in addition to ridesharing, transit, biking, and walking. Cost is one factor in transportation mode choice, and awareness of the cost of driving is useful in making better informed decisions. To bridge this awareness gap, we built and deployed a system that makes the total cost of each driving trip (including depreciation, maintenance, insurance, and fuel) visible to the user. After this intervention, participants were able to more accurately and confidently estimate costs of their driving commutes, and transfer this knowledge to other trips for which they had not seen a cost.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. driving
    2. mode choice
    3. personal informatics
    4. transportation

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    View all
    • (2021)E-Scooter Sustainability – A Clash of Needs, Perspectives, and ExperiencesHuman-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 202110.1007/978-3-030-85613-7_26(365-383)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2021
    • (2020)Digital-Enabled Last Mile: A Study of Passenger Trips in Rural, Low-density Populated AreasProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376509(1-12)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
    • (2018)SwayProceedings of the 32nd International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference10.14236/ewic/HCI2018.132(1-5)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2018
    • (2018)Digital Behaviour Change Interventions to Break and Form HabitsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/319683025:3(1-66)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2018
    • (2018)Learning from the Veg BoxProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3174021(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018

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