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!