Year: 2018

The month I got paid to cycle

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My bike, with the pannier and lights I use every day.

Back in September I took part in a cycling survey and experiment that wanted to see if people cycled more if they got paid for it.

Here in Norway, if you have a long way to drive to work you can get a tax deduction for some of your driving costs. Similarly, if you use a private car for work travels you can get those costs covered by the employer. But those cycling to work or people who use a bike for work travels gets nothing. Based on this, The Institute of Transport Economics wanted to see if rewarding cyclists economically made them cycle more, and I decided to sign up to take part in their research experiment. The way this worked was that I had to to fill in a survey about my weekly physical activity and specify how much I had walked and cycled in the week before answering the survey. Then I was to use a phone application to log all my travels for the next 3 weeks. At the end of the experiment I would get 2 NOK (0,20€) per km I had cycled in those weeks. I would also compete in a lottery among the participants of the experiment to get a bigger price of money.

This application used was a Dutch application called Sense.dat that ran as a background process on the phone and logged all my travels each day. It was clever enough to automatically recognise if I walked, cycled or drove a car, and I could manually edit the travel logs if the application had done any mistakes. Based on the logs and my editing the application learnt where I travelled regularly, and after just a few days it began to label my workplace as work in the daily travel logs. On a typical day the logs could look like this:

2 screenshots of the application, the first one is a full day, and the map is one of the trips that day.

I was really impressed with how good this application worked. The application was made to use as little battery as possible on the phone, and I didn’t notice much difference in battery usage on the phone in the weeks I used the application. But I made sure to charge a little more often. The distances logged by the application also matched well to the distance I would get on google maps.

At the end of the 3 weeks I had cycled 180 km, and was told I would get 360 NOK (around 37€) as a reward for taking part. I just received the money as a universal gift card that can be used in lots of different shops and restaurants, and was pleasantly surprised to see that my reward had been rounded up to a gift card of 400 NOK. I found it interesting and cool to take part in this experiment, and I think it is a good idea to reward cyclists for being environmentally friendly and more healthy in their work travels. This also acknowledges cycling as a means of transport that is treated equally to cars. They are considering to do this in the Netherlands, and I would be happy if they did that here as well.

My gift card!

 

Climate confessions

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“See Norway. Take the train” – an electric locomotive

I want to confess on some climate “offences” I have done recently.

The weekend before this I was in Romania for a wedding. I did it as a long weekend, from Thursday to Monday. As I usually do these days when travelling out of the country I took the night train to Oslo airport and flew from there. I do that mostly so that I can take an early flight from there, arrive early in the other country and have time to continue by train or bus all the way to my end destination within the same day. I also try to not fly within the country to limit my flights for climate reasons.

Not my flight, this plane was going to Mexico.

Then on the way home my second flight was delayed and I missed the night train home. My plan had been to be in Trondheim Tuesday morning and then go to work that same morning (no matter how tired I would be). So instead of taking one more day off from work and take the train the next day I decided to spend the night at the airport and take the next plane from Oslo to Trondheim early the next morning. I arrived home just a little later than planned.

Then for the next week I was dog-sitting for a neighbour. That gave me one more thing to do in the morning as I had to walk the dog. Since I consider myself a b-type person and like to sleep in I usually already don’t have much time in the morning. So, since I had access to the family car I decided to drive to work and back. I ended up doing that for the rest of the week.

Our family car is not this old, then I would for sure not use it.

When it comes to the wedding travel the destination was far away, so I didn’t have much other choice than flying in order to get there in a day. But when I came back to Oslo I did have a choice of taking the train. I used getting home in time for work as an excuse, bought a plane ticket on my phone and slept some hours in a big armchair at the airport. It was fast, easy and convenient. Similarly, with the driving I couldn’t help but notice how easy and comfortable it is to just get in the car and drive to work even if the time I save on the way to work is only 10 minutes compared with cycling (and no time saved on the way home).

I couldn’t help but think that I was the kind of car driver that I like the least while cycling as I think it is wasteful to use a whole car just to carry one person and a lunch box (or lunch box drivers as I like to call them). I would have felt better if our car is electric, but it’s not and I could see the exhaust fumes in the side mirror. I tried to tell myself that a few days of driving isn’t that bad and doesn’t matter much when I cycle year-round the rest of the year.

In the same week I could read in the news about a new report from IPCC that states that rapid and unprecedented action is required to stay within 1.5ºC of global warming. In the same week as I was flying across Europe and driving within the city centre. For a whole week I did not take personal actions to make the climate better. It is just too easy and convenient to fly or drive, and I think that touches on a part of the climate issues. I think too many thinks “I only take a few flights per year” or “a few days of driving won’t matter”. But we should all try our best to limit our emissions, and also tell our politicians to do the same. For being a member of the green party and the Cyclists Association I feel ashamed of myself, tomorrow I will cycle to work!