One Eastside city is boasting that its alternative transportation incentive program has been hugely successful in getting its residents to make fewer vehicle trips—nearly 1 million fewer vehicle trips, to be exact.
The City of Redmond reported yesterday that R-TRIP (the Redmond Trip Resource and Incentive Program) has been successful in convincing 15,001 Redmond residents and employees to take 1,003,081 fewer vehicle trips since the program's implementation in May 2008.
R-TRIP works by giving Redmond residents and employees a one-time $50 incentive for participating in 50 alternative commutes. Participants are encouraged to give up driving alone in favor of carpooling, biking, walking, vanpooling or taking the bus. The incentive can take the form of a gift card from Amazon.com, but users can also choose to have their $50 go toward a carbon offset program.
R-TRIP compiles statistics when users log their alternative commutes on gortrip.com. The website features updated tabulations of the savings in vehicle trips, carbon emissions and gasoline consumption created by users' new green commute habits.
One fun R-TRIP factoid: The number of alternative commute miles logged by users is approaching 30 million—that's enough to circle the earth about 1,200 times.
