Transport, Energy and Climate Economics (TrEnCE) - Next session

Speaker: Kanishka Kacker - Assistant Professor, Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Paper: Experience and Environmental Valuation in Urban Transport Choices.

Abstract: Urban transport electrification is widely promoted to reduce air pollution in highly polluted cities, yet its welfare implications depend on how commuters evaluate environmental attributes across modes and experience levels. Using a randomized discrete choice experiment with commuters in Delhi—one of the world’s most polluted megacities—we examine preferences for electric public and shared transport, capturing valuations across the income distribution. We find that prior usage of a mode fundamentally reshapes electric vehicle preferences. Commuters without experience initially place substantially more weight on local air pollution reductions than greenhouse gas emissions, but prior usage causes pollution concerns to fade. More striking, experience produces sharply divergent willingness-to-pay patterns: WTP declines for electric buses by 95% and for electric auto-rickshaws by 42%, for electric two-wheelers the sign reverses, while WTP for electric cars increases 65%. These mode-specific reversals suggest initial environmental enthusiasm gives way to performance-based evaluation, with critical implications for subsidy design, adoption forecasts, and the distributional incidence of electrification policies.

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