France is Paying Commuters to Bike to Work

You’d hope that better health, lower cost and reduced emissions would be incentive enough to push people out of their cars and onto bikes, but in France only 2.4 percent of the population commutes via bicycle. To encourage the uptake of cycling, the nation has decided to start paying people to bike to work! The transport ministry has teamed up with private companies and institutions to pay employees 25 euro cents for kilometer traveled – which could certainly add up over the course of a year.

[Inhabitat June 4, 2014]

France has started a six-month experiment with paying people to cycle to work, joining other European governments in trying to boost bicycle use to boost people's health, reduce air pollution and cut fossile fuel consumption. Several countries including the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and Britain have bike-to-work schemes, with different kinds of incentives such as tax breaks, payments per kilometre and financial support for buying bicycles. The ministry hopes that the bike-to-work incentive scheme will boost bike use for commuting by 50 percent from 2.4 percent of all work-home journeys, or about 800 million km, with an average distance of 3.5 km per journey. [Newsloop Top News  June 2, 2014]