Case study B-riders cycling reward scheme
With its B-Riders project, the Province of North Brabant is joining forces with business and industry to get employees to switch from car to bicycle use. What this means is that those who cycle to and from work are rewarded for the kilometres that they travel.
B-Riders is a bicycle promotion project in which participants are given a reward when they travel by bicycle. They also receive coaching for this. A specially-developed app logs all cycled kilometres.
The project
B-riders was set up 4 years ago in North Brabant as part of the Optimising Use programme in which national and regional government and the private sector are working together. Mobility management projects, such as the Brabant Mobility network (BMN) and the Employers Platform Ons Brabant Fietst (Our Brabant by Bike) also actively promote the programme.
B-Riders was developed in three stages. In year one, 2013, B-Riders introduced a specially developed app to monitor e-bikers and to reward them on the basis of the kilometres they rode by bicycle. Surveys revealed that coaching had an extra encouraging effect. In the second stage, coaching was thus provided to all participants and all cyclists were welcomed into the project.
In stage three, the transition was made to help employers contribute to funding the scheme, and B-Riders now works together with other projects to facilitate new innovations. In this last phase, everyone is still welcome to join in for points, but only employees of the affiliated companies receive a financial reward for each kilometre cycled. That reward has been substantially reduced over time, but the results remain just as positive.
Implementation
Everyone in North Brabant can take part in B-Riders, but communication is focused above all on the large towns and cities. Research institutions use data and information from B-Riders in various studies. B-Riders is also linked to innovative developments for intelligent traffic control installations (iVRIs), for example at ensuring that cyclists are given green lights quicker, and more often.
Results
B-Riders has been well monitored and its effectiveness has in fact been demonstrated (see figures 1 and 2). The bicycle data generated by B-Riders are used to monitor the project, to undertake further research and in the end to improve cycling policy. One valuable tool is CyclePRINT, an application used to visualise cycling data. Substantive information about these effects appears in the fact sheet 'Bicycle reward projects'.
Considerations for deployment elsewhere
B-Riders has generated the following insights:
- a combination between reward (to persuade participants) and coaching (to stick to the new behaviour) results in permanent behaviour change
- the community approach works
- employers are taking bicycle encouragement programmes ever more seriously and feel a shared responsibility
- employees are good ambassadors when it comes to making an approach to employers
- behaviour change calls for perseverance
Recommendations for the deployment of B-Riders:
- make sure you have a good team with the relevant expertise for design and implementation
- deploy B-Riders as widely as possible, even if participants are not precisely within your target group. This results in a positive image and use of the social environment (ambassadors)
- keep innovation within the programme so that participants and the parties responsible for the programme continue to see it as fun and interesting
- include good-quality monitoring and evaluation of the project immediately in the project layout, so that you can monitor data from the project with relative ease and can improve the project
- try to keep the project running for a long(er) period. Above all employers are attracted to a project which they recognise and that has already proven its value in practice
