This article explores the concept of “public commons” and its relationship with travel decisions under a unique setting: street cleaning in the New York City area. Using a natural experimental design, it investigates the impact of street cleaning on car usage for five hundred randomly selected households. Street cleaning encourages car usage for households without off-street parking and discourages car usage for households with off-street parking. The net effect is an increase of vehicle miles traveled by 7.1 percent, at least 27 percent of which is not a mere redistribution from non-street-cleaning days.
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