arXiv · 2511.09237
Demand-side decarbonisation at scale via MaaS-integrated carbon incentives
Abstract
Digital carbon incentives are increasingly used to promote low-carbon travel, but city-scale evidence on their behavioral and carbon-accounting implications remains limited. We evaluated a carbon-incentive program on a Beijing Mobility-as-a-Service platform using 4.82 billion trips from 2.96 million users over 13 months, with a matched panel of enrolled and non-enrolled users. Enrollment was associated with a 20.3 percentage-point increase in the monthly low-carbon travel share, with pre-enrollment trends remaining near zero across event-study tests. A random-forest accounting scenario trained on pre-enrollment data implied a 1.8% citywide decline in gasoline-car trips and annual reductions of 94,353 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 5.7% of the certified reductions traded in Beijing's carbon market in 2023. This estimate is model-dependent rather than a directly observed or causally identified program effect. Larger program-associated responses were concentrated in areas with greater transit access. These results show that carbon-market-financed digital incentives can support measurable low-carbon travel responses at the city scale.
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Bing Liu, Yuan Liao, Sonia Yeh, Oded Cats, Kristian S. Nielsen, Zhenning Dong, Yong Wang, Yi Li, Yanli Liu, Zirui Ni, Xiaolei Ma. 2025-11-12. Demand-side decarbonisation at scale via MaaS-integrated carbon incentives. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09237
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