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Purpose – To investigate the potential future role of information delivery in terms of reducing transport-related emissions. The assumed response of travellers to information and the notions of content and context are provided, together with factors that can determine an individual's propensity to seek and engage with travel information.

Methodology/approach – A review of information use, the behavioural stages of change and context design is undertaken, incorporating a research case study in the use of framing.

Findings – Recent theoretical and empirical insights into behavioural change provide new insights into the role of information in reducing transport-related emissions. Traveller information offers many benefits to the user and could be influential in affecting travel behaviour change, although there are socio-psychological factors outside the control of information service designers that also need to be considered, such as the ‘stage of change’ people are at in relation to a change in behaviour.

Originality/value – The chapter examines how travel information could go beyond the provision of trip choice data and incorporate contextual elements to make it more effective. Concepts related to the Transtheoretical Model (stages of change) and the latest thinking in behavioural economics are discussed in relation to an increase in the likelihood of environmental travel alternatives being considered and chosen.

Travel is usually not valued in and of itself, but for the activities it allows people to partake in. Therefore, if change occurs in either the activities people perform, or in the means they use to perform them, the demand for travel is likely to change accordingly. Technologies have the potential to accommodate the activities people need or want to perform and how they perform them. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to increase the understanding of the complex relations between technologies developing outside the transport domain, social practices and travel, and the uncertainties that can result from these linkages. As such it draws attention to the interconnectivity of transport with other domains (e.g. healthcare, retail, leisure).

The relations between non‐transport technologies, social practices and travel are largely unintended and/or unanticipated. This study therefore utilised notions developed elsewhere of the mechanisms through which unintended consequences materialize. With these notions in mind, some selected examples of past, present and possible future technologies expose the possible indirect influences they can have on travel demand, thereby developing the conceptual understanding of these linkages.

If policies are being developed to limit, change, or reduce people's travel then non‐transport technologies may thwart those policy ambitions in serious ways or be realised in unexpected and surprising forms.

There appears precious little (quantitative) evidence of data that captures the relations between technologies, social practices and travel.

This study is one of the first to examine the indirect impacts of technological developments occurring outside the transport domain on travel demand.

Erel Avineri is associate professor in travel behaviour at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol. He has 20 years experience of consultancy, research and teaching in transport, logistics and operations management. Since he joined UWE in 2004 he has lead research in the fields of travel behaviour, travel information systems, road safety and behavioural change. Dr Avineri has gained wide recognition for his research on travel behaviour under uncertainty, the incorporation of socio-psychological aspects into behaviour models and the design of behaviour change policy measures. Applying choice architecture, Dr Avineri studies the effect of ‘nudges’ on the perception of and attitudes to CO2 reduction. He holds degrees in industrial engineering and management (BSc) and transportation sciences (MSc, PhD) from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.