Original article by Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities

People don’t always make rational decisions. The entire field of behavioral economics, with all its colorfully named biases and heuristics, is based on our irrationality.

Go ahead and add cars to the illogical list too. In an upcoming paper in Transport Policy, a group of Italian researchers report that people show an irrational bias toward automobiles — they call it the “car effect.” Instead of considering all travel modes and choosing the one that saves the most time and money, people prefer to drive even when it’s not the best objective option.

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