Lewes Road transport scheme wins another award for Brighton and Hove. But what about Valley Gardens?

Good to see that the Lewes Road scheme keeps collecting awards, the latest being the Excellence in Cycling and Walking category at the National Transport Awards. The Lewes Road scheme, which links Brighton city centre with destinations along Lewes Road, has provided better connectivity for cyclists and walkers, and also provides improvements to speed buses along the way. The £6.4 million project saw nearly three miles of dual carriageway changed into a single carriageway with a new bus lane, widened cycle lane, and revamped bus stops and traffic signals. All of which makes it much easier to travel between the centre of Brighton, the universities, the American Express Community Stadium and Stanmer Park, as well as residential areas.

  

What is amazing is the amount of fuss caused by such schemes when they are being planned and installed. Travelling (by bus) along the Lewes Road in the peaks last week, I’d observe that everything seems to be working pretty smoothly. It is hard to believe the brouhaha about the Lewes Road  scheme, which some seemed to think presaged the end of the world as we know it. But, as the endowment effect,inertia bias and the status quo bias from behavioural economics show, people hate to have things taken away from them – even when what replaces it is better.

Before: Lewes Road at the Vogue Gyratory - note cyclists

The Lewes Road scheme is one of a number of sustainable transport improvements around Brighton and Hove, which have included investing in better bus services, installing cycle contraflows and 20mph zones, as well as upgrading public spaces. These schemes, designed to change people’s transport behaviour by making it easier to take low-carbon options, have featured in a recent approving blog post by a staffer at the ClimateChange Committee. The post notes that, against a worrying national trend towards increasing carbon emissions from transport, developments in our city like the Lewes Road scheme and others,  

“make walking, cycling and taking the bus a much more attractive option. Car ownership in Brighton is currently the lowest in South East England, cycling to work doubled between 2001 and 2011, as did the number of bus journeys between 1993 and 2013.”

With the change in administration that took place in May 2015, and the switch to a Labour-controlled council, another long awaited scheme, for Valley Gardens, has been put on hold pending further work on traffic modelling. Let’s hope that this doesn’t mean that the long overdue improvements to the City’s main gateway, from St. Peter’s Church to the Palace Pier, has been kicked into the long grass, never to be seen again. Because if it has, it’s the worst possible news for pedestrians and cyclists, and anyone one else who believes that Valley Gardens deserves a better fate than being a congested and fume-laded traffic corridor, a river of vehicles which currently divides our city.

Carfree economic rockstar

Yo! I’m an economic rockstar. Apparently. Have a listen to the podcast and find out about economics, behavioural economics, being carfree and more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Carfree Reflections on Rotterdam

Just back from giving a presentation on behavioural economics at the conference of the European Social Marketing Association in Rotterdam. The conference (of which, more here) was all about behaviour change, and when it comes to getting people to build more physical activity into their daily lives, there are few better observatories than the Netherlands.


Rotterdam is a city of 600,000 people, and home to the world's second-biggest port (it used to be the biggest, until Shanghai pipped it to the post). Rotterdam has a metro, trams, a good bus network, and several main line rail stations, including the extraordinary Centraal station (pictured above and below). A 3 day €14 ticket gets you unlimited access to the metro, buses and trams.



Of course, there are cars in Rotterdam, but they are not allowed to be dominant. Rotterdam is a city which has been configured for people on bikes and people on foot. It's a city with lots of green and lots of water, where people are purposeful. But it’s also a noticeably calm city - presumably a result of effective public transport, those endorphins from active travel, and not being forced to breathe an invisible miasma of traffic fumes.



As well as the Dutch default of segregated cycleways, Rotterdam also has extensive pedestrianisation, including Europe's first pedestrianised shopping street, Ljinbaan.



Active travel in Rotterdam means that trams and buses have priority, and cars are required to give way to bikes and pedestrians. That's down to urban planning, street design and people-friendly liability laws that favour the non-mechanical over the mechanical. What a delight, as a pedestrian, to press the button at a traffic crossing and get an immediate green man signal. Over time, it’s not just the cityscape, but the culture that changes. And one other thing we observed: anecdotal evidence, maybe, but we saw very few overweight people and only a few that could be described as obese. UK health officials, take note!

Killer Facts: Terrorism, Car Crashes and Behavioural Economics

A telling statistic from an article by John Lanchester in the Guardian about the “justification” for the surveillance society revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks about GCHQ, the NSA and the Prism programme. “Since 9/11, 53 people have been killed by terrorists in the UK. Every one of those deaths is tragic. So is every one of the 26,805 deaths to have occurred on Britain's roads between 2002 and 2012 inclusive, an average of 6.67 deaths a day. Let's call that the SDRD, standard daily road deaths. The terrorist toll for 12 years comes to 0.0121 SDRD. This means that 12 years of terrorism has killed as many people in the UK as eight days on our roads.”

Behavioural economics can help explain how this happens. First, the availability heuristic says that we assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more we must have experienced it in the past (and the more likely it is to happen again). So newspaper stories featuring spectacular events like murders or fires or terrorism are vivid, salient and available to memory. And salience and vividness aid ease of recall. If something stands out from everything else, we think it’s more likely to happen. Even if it actually isn’t. Something to think about next time you get in a car. Or the next time a politician invokes the "war on terror."

John Lanchester, “The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried about GCHQ.” The Guardian, Thursday 3 October 2013

“Avoid the long commute” says behavioural economist

Following the post on 24 July about the algorithm-driven insurance penalty of long distance commuting, here’s some advice from behavioural economist Dan Ariely (left), writing in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago.

Focusing on the uncertainty encountered by long distance drivers (although the same might apply to some public transport commutes), Ariely concludes, “I suggest that you take distance from work into account as a significant factor in deciding where to live. It will play a larger role in your life than you think.”
(Photo: NPR)

The Behavioural Economics Of Owning A Car

Here’s a link to my article on behavioural economics and car ownership, just published in eg magazine.

The Wisdom of Spock

Mr Spock: Must we? (go by car)
Captain Kirk: It's faster than walking.
Mr Spock: But not as safe.
Captain Kirk: Are you afraid of cars?
Mr Spock: Not at all, Captain. It is your driving that alarms me.
A Piece of the Action, Star Trek, 1968

Spock is, of course, a rare beast – someone who follows the model of rationality beloved of conventional economics and viewed more sceptically by behavioural economics. If there were more Spocks out there, people would spend less time in cars.

How To Live Longer – Ditch the Car, Go By Train

The news that citizens of the UK come 12th on a list of 19 countries for life expectancy at birth means that Brits can expect to have shorter lives than people in many other countries – like Spain, Italy and Australia. A lot of commentary has blamed the NHS, but, as Prof John Newton, chief knowledge officer of Public Health England, which assumes its responsibilities on 1 April said, "I'd be very surprised if it was the healthcare factors that are making the difference….It is more to do with a culture of supportive communities, people's lifestyles and their diets."

The Guardian has published a list of ten ways to live longer – and Number 9 is Take The Train. As the Guardian notes, “Road injuries were the 12^th highest cause of years of life lost in the UK in 2010, but if you take just adults aged 20 to 54, they were fifth – after heart disease, self-harm, cirrhosis and breast cancer, and just above drug use. According to the independent Oxford healthcare journal Bandolier, which used 2006-7 data from sources including the World Health Organisation and the Department for Transport, the lifetime risk of dying before the age of 75 are one in 976 in a car, one in 54,433 on a plane and one in 131,313 in a train.”
This will not be news to students of behavioural economics, who know that we humans are incredibly bad at risk assessment, particularly when it comes to everyday activities – which, for many people, includes getting in the car. Another great reason not to…

Dangerous Driving: Government Minister Drives Into Trouble

No, not that one: Chris Huhne admits perverting the course of justice. This one: Welsh Secretary takes chauffeured Jaguar for 100 metre walk to Number 10. Another case of do as I say, not do as I do - and the ever present danger of what behavioural economics recognises as giving in to temptation.

Twenty’s Plenty for Brighton and Hove: What A Difference A Frame Makes

As today’s Independent points out, Brighton and Hove is going ahead with a 20mph default speed limit in the city centre, joining a growing list of UK cities which has adopted the safer speed. It’s a pity that the Independent chose to frame the article as a loss for Brighton’s taxi drivers. Behavioural economics tells us that the story would have been quite different if the piece had used a different frame: the gain for those of us who walk, cycle, visit, live, or work in Brighton and Hove. Same data, different frame. Spot the difference….

“Britain has the highest rail fares in Europe." Or Does It?

Following all the brouhaha about Britain’s rail fares being Europe’s most expensive , here’s a fascinating post by The Man in Seat 61, Mark Smith, who’s the go-to guy for information about European rail journeys. Warning: contains surprising conclusions. Helpful hint: behavioural economics can help explain why we so often get it wrong on things like prices. (see post of 17th August 2012).

New Year’s Resolutions and Behavioural Economics

31^st December, the date when we undertake to be better people in the year ahead, normally by promising ourselves that we’ll spend less money, get fitter, lose weight, be more relaxed….eat fewer biscuits.

For the 80% of us who live in urban areas, there’s one New Year’s Resolution that will help achieve all of these: give up owning a car. Can behavioural economics help us stick to our resolutions? First, behavioural economics shows that we are loss-averse: so it’s better to re-frame a decision not in terms of what’s being “lost” (the car), but as what’s being gained (money, fitness, being thinner). Re-framing a loss as a gain makes it much more attractive. Second, humans succumb to the status quo bias, tending to go with the default: if there’s a car parked outside, despite our resolution to walk, we’ll give into temptation and take to four wheels for the next short journey. And thirdly, everyone knows that resolutions are easy to make but hard to stick with – behavioural economists know that a “commitment device” will help the process. For example, one way of not giving into the temptation to splurge on credit cards is to cut them up or hide them. Similarly, it’s a lot easier to eat fewer biscuits if there are none at home. So maybe there’s only one sure-fire way to beat the temptation to get into your car: don’t have one parked outside. Happy 2013!  

(Photo of Jammy Dodger from www.tangosquad.com)

Short Cuts: Stuff About Cars in Books About Other Things

David Halpern is the Head of the Behavioural Insight Team at 10 Downing Street, the team which is using behavioural economics (Nudges etc) to improve policy. The following quote appears on page 224 in his book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations

“For the most part we are very big on personal responsibility for other people and when things are going well for ourselves. But when things go badly in our lives, regardless of cause, we go off the idea of personal responsibility pretty fast. Unfortunately for policymakers, we hold both these positions quite strongly and at the same time. When we drive too fast or aggressively in heavy traffic, it is because we are in a hurry to sort out an important matter. But when other people drive too fast it is because they are idiots and ought to be fined.”

50,000 Page Views: Passing A Milestone (But Not In A Car)

For Jules Verne the magic number was 20,000 (Leagues Under The Sea). For cockneys, Londoners born within the sound of Bow Bells, it could be 40,000 – after all, there are “forty fousand fevvers on a frush.” (translation: 40,000 feathers on a thrush.) But for this blog the magic number is 50,000: the number of page views registered since the first post in 2010. So big thanks to everyone who reads it - as these page view figures show, you are a pretty international lot: United States: 30142/United Kingdom: 12385/Canada: 668/Australia: 514/Italy: 445/Germany: 422/France: 418/Russia: 370/Norway: 212/Belgium: 168.

You are also fairly reticent, as in not given to making comments. Perhaps you are in violent agreement with the content? Either way, it would be nice to hear more from you. As for the popularity of the posts, top rankings go to posts on economics and behavioural economics, followed by a short story about the oil running out (A Week to Ten Days), then Banksy, Nick Cave, Dave Gilmour….and Hove greengrocer the late Tony Magdi.

It would be very nice to hear more from you, so please feel free to comment on anything that you see here. And of course, send a link to your friends and anyone who you think might be interested. Onwards and upwards…on foot, by bike, by bus and by train, naturally.

Trains Can Be Cheap: Apply Some Behavioural Economics And Put Your Heuristics On Hold

The previous post showed how you could travel 588 miles on British trains for around £37 a head, compared to the 45p a mile cost of using your own car – which comes to £264.60 for the same mileage. People normally say that a train might be cheaper for one or two people, but not for multiple travellers. For this journey, you’d have needed seven people for the car to be cheaper. You might argue (wrongly) that the relevant costs are just the fuel for the journey: assuming around 35 mpg, that would be about 16.8 gallons, or 76 litres: £99 at £1.30 a litre. So even paying just for fuel, you’d need more than three people travelling to make going by car cheaper, not to mention the hassle of driving for over 5 hours. So how come mainstream thinking is that trains are expensive and unaffordable, while the truth is a lot messier: sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t? Behavioural economics can shed some light.
When rail fares go up - like the recent announcement - there’s normally massive media coverage. So the idea “trains are expensive” becomes highly salient and very vivid. Here’s another example, from the Daily Telegraph, which points out that planes are cheaper than trains on half of the surveyed routes in the UK - that’s pretty vivid. (although also in the article, much less prominent, is the following quote, “Despite soaring fuel prices, travelling by car proved cheaper than taking the train on 16 of the 50 journeys.” Which is a great example of another behavioural economics technique, notably framing - because what the data actually says is that train is cheaper than car for 34 out of 50 journeys. Or put it another way, train is cheaper than car on 68% of the journeys in the survey).
So, thinking about our own journeys, what we mostly don’t do is analyse the comparative costs of using different modes for a particular trip. Instead, those vivid and salient examples of expensive train travel pop up because they are readily available to our memory, hence the “availability heuristic:” a rule of thumb we use when faced with a decision.
As Daniel Kahneman, the godfather of behavioural economics, shows in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, when we are asked a difficult question we mostly don’t analyse the data using the rational part of the brain. Instead, we often allow our instinctive "gut reaction" to answer a related, simpler question. In this case we might just skip the difficult stuff and ask ourself “why don’t I just use the car?” Understandable when the alternative is going through the complicated and energy-sapping analysis of rail fare options (MoneySavingExpert can help out here). Far easier to let our availability heuristic do the mental shortcut and conclude that train travel is expensive, so we’ll go by car. Even more likely if high-profile media coverage triggers an "availability cascade", a self-sustaining chain of events which leads to the overestimation of probabilities – which in this case would be “going by train is more expensive.”
So here’s

a behavioural economics guide to cheaper travel:

First, put your heuristics on hold – especially your availability heuristic;
Second, make sure you ask the right question (eg: what is the cheapest and most convenient way to accomplish this journey?);
Third, ensure that you answer the same question, rather substitute an easier one that springs to mind.
You might be surprised by the answer…..

Drugged, Drunk and Distracted Drivers

Advanced news about the Queen’s Speech, which sets out the legislative agenda for the UK government, noted proposals to equalise the law regarding drug users and drunk drivers, although the proposal is not listed in reports of the actual content. Either way, a big benefit of not spending time behind the wheel is freedom from worrying about the mental and cognitive condition of other drivers - who may have had too many drinks, smoked a joint, done a line or be subject to the effects of numerous other substances. These are all bad for road safety, but distracted driving as a result of mobile telecoms might be even worse – as yesterday’s Quote of the Week from BruceMcF, noted “Driving is something that makes it tricky to respond to a text.” The problem is that drivers won’t stop driving just because they are  chatting, tweeting or updating their Facebook pages. If you spend time in a car, and you aren’t worried about this, you should be. The Institute of Advanced Motorists conducted a study using a simulator to check the impact on reaction times of people using telecoms devices whilst driving.  The table below summarises the findings. The study shows that driving after consuming alcohol at the legal limit has the lowest impact on driver’s reaction times – top of the list is chatting on the phone, while social networking comes next, then texting. Behavioural economics shows that we are pretty bad at assessing risk and probability, and this is another example - next time you’re behind the wheel, remember that the biggest danger to your personal safety might not be other drivers who are drugged or drunk – it could turn out to be the  distracted.

It’s Cheaper By Train: Economics and Behavioural Economics Postscript

What might conventional economics and behavioural economics say about the previous post? Conventional economics would presumably start off by saying that the reason why more people don’t come to similar conclusions - and take the train - is down to information failure. That is, for a market (let’s call it the market for personal transport from A to B) to operate effectively, all market players (including you and me) need to have access to all of the information out there. Which means knowing a) that you can get from Hove to Cromer by train and b) that cheap train fares are available.
The other information necessary for making a rational decision is the full costs of doing the journey by car. Of course, if you already own a car, many of the costs are fixed, and don’t change according to how much you use it – capital cost, depreciation, insurance, tax etc. Again, a car owner might say that since these costs are already incurred, it makes sense to use the car. In fact, a truly rational economic approach would be that these are “sunk” costs - if the money has been spent, and cannot be recouped, it should not play a part in the decision about a future journey. Instead, each journey should be evaluated on the basis of the marginal cost of that journey. Which means comparing the price of the fuel with the cost of the rail ticket. In the case of Hove to Cromer return, it’s still cheaper by train if there’s one person travelling, on par for two travellers, and only becomes cheaper by road if there are more than two people in the party.
What we think about the price of going by train is influenced by the “story” we tell  about train ticket prices. These “stories,” which just don’t play a role in conventional economics, are important in behavioural economics. The story is that train travel is expensive and complicated, as this article from the BBC illustrates. The reality is that sometimes fares are expensive, sometimes they aren’t. It mainly depends on how captive the customers are. Passenger yield management, familiar from airlines, is becoming commonplace on the rails. So price elasticity of demand is important – train companies will charge more if the customer can’t switch to another provider.
On top of all that, paying out the money for a train ticket is what behavioural economists call salient, or what you and I call painful: unlike many of the costs of owning and running a car, some of which, like depreciation, are practically unseen. At least until you come to sell the car. But the costs of fuel and the price of parking, are extremely salient, hence subject to intense focus by car owners.
So when it comes to making decisions, conventional economics says you need as much information as possible, while behavioural economics says that you can have too much information. So when it comes to making a decision, a key question is always going to be: how much information is enough? And just asking that question might be a good place to start…

Petrol Panic, Pump Rage and Pastygate: Economics and Behavioural Economics

A week, according to former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics. And those queues on filling station forecourts across the UK as a fuel crisis loomed now look so last week. But it ain’t over till it’s over, and this one could run and run if the fuel tanker drivers go ahead with their strike. So, a couple of questions about what happened and why: how to avoid it, and how to explain it.

1. How To Avoid It

Give up your car.
2. How to Explain It: Economics and Behavioural Economics

A BBC commentator said that public response to the potential fuel shortages was a classic example of game theory: everything is ok until a few people form a queue. Then others join in and, before you know it, there’s a crisis. It’s debatable whether this is game theory: it might be better to start with economics - the most basic supply and demand analysis - and then add the psychology, behavioural economics. Starting with supply: there’s the long run industry trend which has seen concentration of fuel retailing into the hands of the supermarkets and the oil majors as thousands of independent petrol stations have closed in recent years - reducing diversity of supply, reducing resilience and redundancy, and maximising the prospect of supply side bottlenecks (something to think about when filling the tank at a supermarket). And there’s the short term supply side: tanker drivers, whose job it is to supply this depleted number of filling stations, start to consider strike action. Suddenly, those supply side bottlenecks look a lot more risky.
And then there’s the demand side. Energy minister Ed Davey has said that, on a normal day, of the 31 million cars in the UK, about a third of tanks have full tanks, whilst the average tank is a third full. So people "just need to do the sensible thing... get a full tank of petrol, not a half-tank." When one minister starts talking about topping up the tank at every opportunity and another advises keeping jerry cans of spare petrol in the garage, the psychology is bound to shift: suddenly, there’s a new “normal.” How does behavioural economics help with explaining these demand side phenomena? Start with media images of long queues at the petrol pumps, and other images like these pictures. A reminder of what could happen. Loss aversion will kick in: even if it’s a potential, future loss, we want to minimise the chances of it happening. And before you can say “fill the tank,” the combination of these vivid images, salient to motorists, have triggered an availability cascade – defined by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow as “a self sustaining chain of events which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large scale government action.” At this point, the story changes – there is going to be a fuel shortage and we’d better stock up. More and more drivers take action, feeding a new norm. The herd changes direction, hey presto, queues at filling stations, and say hello to a self-fulfilling prophecy. It there wasn’t a crisis to start with, there is now.
There has been a lot of coverage of the current UK government’s embrace of new methods of behaviour change, as exemplified by the Behavioural Insight Team, aka The Nudge Unit, in Number 10 Downing Street. Looking at this episode, which isn’t over yet, it looks more like low politics than high insight. But, from the government’s perspective, it has helped push higher taxes on grannies – and pasties - off the front pages.

Macca In A Muckle: Paul McCartney Gets Stuck On The Eurostar

Sir Paul McCartney was among passengers travelling between Paris and London who got stuck when the Eurostar broke down this week, as heavy snow in France caused problems with the overhead cables.  His six hour delay was big news, splashed across most of the newspapers.

Behavioural economists would note that this was a pretty vivid and salient episode, likely to create a lasting impression of Eurostar. This could then feed an availability heuristic: Eurostar is prone to breakdowns (it isn’t the first time this has happened). Such a heuristic could trump the actual data about the reliability of Eurostar, but it’s the heuristic that drives decisions, not the data. When similar things happen on the roads, and people get stuck in their car for hours, the same thing doesn’t happen: people don’t decide not to drive again.

Less vivid and less salient, hence no heuristic to be available for future decisions. As well as the behavioural economics, there’s a more cheering message from this episode: not just that Macca seems to have been pretty equable throughout (he understands that “these things can happen”), but that he chooses to use public transport, and not a private jet. When Macca lived in Hove during his marriage to Heather Mills, he was often spotted taking the train to London. Whatever you think of the music, Macca’s willingness to mix it on public transport has to be a plus.

Economics, Behavioural Economics, Cars and Car Clubs

Today, the car club firm Zipcar, which acquired another car club firm, Streetcar in April 2010, is withdrawing its cars from Brighton and Hove and re-deploying them to London: good news for Londoners, and good news for City Car Club, which is now the only car club in Brighton and Hove. As a transitional deal, Zipcar is providing a year’s free membership to City Car Club. And Zipcar members will still be able to hire Zipcars in other locations, both around the UK and in Canada and the US.
Thinking about Zipcar’s departure from Brighton got me pondering how conventional economics and behavioural economics could help explain what’s going on here. Conventional economics would explain that providing a service like a car club (sometimes known as car share) means sweating the assets to the max – the costs are mainly fixed (capital cost of the car, insurance, cost of the parking bay etc), which makes it important to hire out the cars for as many hours a day as possible. It’s clear from Zipcar’s decision that this is going to be easier when the cars are parked in London. So why weren’t the people of Brighton and Hove using the Zipcars more often?

Behavioural economics (which I teach) can help explain this. A car club is a substitute for owning a car. But giving up your car is not easy: we hate to give things up. Human beings are loss-averse - psychologically, the “pain” we suffer from a loss is more than twice as much as the benefit we feel from an equivalent gain.  Adam Smith (picture from wiki), the man on the back of the £20 note, is sometimes described as a prototypical behavioural economist. In the Wealth of Nations he said, "we suffer more... When we fall from a better to a worse situation, than we ever enjoy when we rise from a worse to a better.” Consumers view parting with an already owned good to be a greater loss than the potential gain from acquiring another good of equal value.

In 1979 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk.’ This seminal work of behavioural economics charted objective and subjective gains and losses with respect to a reference point, as opposed to the standard utility function of conventional economic theory. The shape of the curves using Prospect Theory illustrates that we focus on what we might lose, rather than what we might gain - thinking about selling something, we think about the things we'll miss, rather than the hassles of ownership. Combined with the status quo bias, this means that people prefer situations to remain static and unchanged. Change of ownership would disrupt the status quo, causing unease.

“Giving up” something like a car feels like a big loss: studies show that the perceived benefits need to be at least double the perceived losses to persuade people to give something up. A consequence of loss aversion is that people tend to place a higher value on a good that they own compared with an object of identical value that they do not own. This is called the endowment effect, and it means that people value things differently depending on whether they are gaining or losing them. Loss tends to be felt more keenly than gain.

And the latter means that ownership weaves it’s own spell, making it even harder to let go: people become attached to objects that are in their possession and are reluctant to part with them, even if they would not have particularly desired the objects had they not been endowed with them.

And there’s something else. Zipcars were pretty discreet. Nice cars, usually VW Golfs. You had to look hard to spot that they were Zipcars. No doubt it was a marketing decision to put them on the street practically unbranded. City Car Club cars are different: the company logo is emblazoned on the side. They get noticed. Unlike Zipcars, they are salient. And salience, the extent to which something stands out from its surroundings, translates in behavioural economics to a tendency to over-weight certain phenomena, which may then account for bias in decision making.  Zipcars, lacking salience, weren’t “front of mind.” So maybe fewer people were aware of them, fewer people who might join up and use them, which meant less sweating of those assets. Which was where we came in… And, as far as Brighton is concerned, where Zipcar goes out.