Cities are increasingly earning a reputation as leaders in the push for policy and service delivery innovation. By virtue of their position between the more distant federal government and local neighborhood communities, city governments have unique potential to create real, positive impact at scale for everyday residents.
Providing good, effective government services today requires a nuanced understanding of human behavior to better design human-centric policies and programs. The Chicago BDT works across city government to design low-cost, scalable solutions to problems and provide policy and programmatic support to departments. Together, BDT team members and key department staff inside City Hall and across city agencies work to identify the best ways to design and test behavioral solutions to problems facing 2.7 million Chicagoans.
In every context that a City of Chicago agency interacts with the public, there is an opportunity to enhance outcomes and experiences. For example:
- A study conducted by the BDT on Chicago’s ‘bag tax’ showed it reduced disposable bag use by over 40%, which represents significant potential for environmental impact. Information about our preliminary results can be found here.
- Full results and analysis from this study are now available here.
- A pilot conducted with the Chicago Transit Authority sent text messages to transit riders to help them change their commute during peak hours on the evenings of Cubs home games. It led to a 17.5% reduction in peak-hour ridership from 5-6 PM from downtown Red Line stations. This could have implications in efforts to ease commute congestion across other transit systems. More information about this work can be found here.
Support for the Chicago Behavioral Design Team is provided by the City of Chicago.
Interested in learning more about this work applying behavioral science to a crucial social problem? Reach out to us: info@ideas42.org or tweet at @ideas42 to join the conversation.
