Even for urban households with both a car and transit options, how people get to work in the morning doesn't feel like a "choice." Economists aside, few of us sit down and calculate the differential cost of driving versus riding the bus or train. Most are lucky to have a few minutes left over for family or Internet on their way out the door.
The habit of car dependency, in particular, poses a major problem for sustainable cities. As transportation experts push for mobility "carrots" and "sticks" — making alternative modes more attractive while making driving less attractive — they can't forget they're also battling certain aspects of the human brain that nudge us away from considering any changes to our lives at all.
A group of researchers led by Yavor Yalachkov turn to neuroscience to help explain why so many people remain stuck in their mode choice in a recent essay on science and society. Writing in Trends in Cognitive Science, Yalachkov and company survey the latest evidence on habit development in light of car dependency. Much of it comes as no surprise: habits are triggered automatically by learning associations in our environment. We wake up in the morning, we head to the car.
The greater insight recently drawn by cognitive scientists is that a shift in brain activity occurs to facilitate our routines. Rather than use the parts of our brain that evaluate a decision — in short, rather than engage in a true "choice" — we rely in these habitual moments on neural regions that perform an action without much concern for outcome.
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