Denver Streets Partnership’s Bicycling Reward Program is a success!
By Jace Davis
From “free” parking to repaving hundreds of miles of streets every year, Denver, like most U.S. cities, provides plenty of publicly funded incentives to drive in our city. At the Denver Streets Partnership, our mission is to reduce Denver’s unsustainable dependence on cars and design communities that put people first. In line with our mission, this past spring we had the opportunity to run a small experiment to answer the question: “What if we paid people to ride bicycles?”
We partnered with the Denver Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency to pilot three bicycling incentive programs over the course of April, May, and June of this past year. Each program consisted of different ways to earn money by riding a bicycle instead of driving.
Version 1: Mileage reimbursement (70 participants): For all transportation-related trips made by bike, participants were paid $1 per mile, up to $200 per month.
Version 2: Wrap-around support (15 participants): Participants received “Confident Commuter” training; up to 4 hours of personalized coaching; up to $500 for bicycle accessories, repairs, and/or subsidy for purchase of non-e-bikes from local bike shops; and $200 upon completion of the pilot program. This final incentive for completing the program was awarded to anyone who used a bike for transportation at least once per week.
Version 3: Mileage reimbursement plus wrap-around support (16 participants): Participants received the benefits of both 1 and 2 above.
Amazingly, more than 1,400 people in Denver submitted applications to participate. While we could only include 101 participants in this initial pilot, it’s clear people in Denver are interested in incentive programs to ride bikes!
Over the course of the three months, participants took more than 4,100 bicycle trips, totaling more than 24,700 miles. Each version of the program accomplished our goal of successfully incentivizing more bike trips to replace vehicle trips, but the participants who were paid per mile rode more miles on average, as shown in the chart below.
Each participant was given the opportunity to give feedback on the program via phone interview. Here are just a few highlights:
Gina (V3)
“It’s beautiful in Colorado, and when you’re in a car all the time, you don’t see as much as you do on a bike, when you go places a car can’t go, to different areas of your neighborhood that you wouldn’t have normally been going.”
Jason (V1)
“It’s going great. I am a person who rode my bike in the past, but having a financial incentive is definitely an additional motivator to hop on two wheels as opposed to four wheels…Being on a bike just makes everyone happier. It’s much easier to get your kids on an e-bike than it is to try to get them in a car seat and get out snacks and do everything. But my son literally requests when I get home to go for e-bike rides, so it’s a fun way to connect with your kids, your family, and your community.”
Onyx (V2)
“I was motivated by the program to try to ride all the way down to get my hair cut this past week when that is such a long ride that I probably would have taken a car otherwise.…I am a disabled person. And so I don’t commute to work every day or anything”
Participants also overwhelmingly expressed a desire for safer bicycle infrastructure, underscoring the need for Denver to continue to invest in building out the planned Denver Moves Bikes network as swiftly as possible, to truly maximize the benefits of incentive programs like this one and achieve real change in how people get around our city.
We at the Denver Streets Partnership are grateful for the opportunity we had to work with the City to provide incentives to ride bicycles. It warmed our hearts to see so many people in this program gain new confidence to try a different option other than driving to get where they needed to go. We strongly encourage the City to continue funding programs like these so that we can live in a safer, more vibrant Denver.