Looking for bright spots: a bottom-up approach to encouraging urban exercise

Abstract

Many journeys in urban environments are short and could be conveniently carried out on foot or by bike. However, a lot of people use public transport or cars for short journeys and this places pressure on urban transport infrastructures. Motivating people to change their transport habits is a wicked problem and challenging to address. We outline our current approach that involves a long term study of Fitbit users to identify the 'bright spots': the factors that enable some people to successfully change their transportation habits in the long term.