With a $100,000 grant from the Transportation Research Board, the non-profit Palto Alto Transportation Management Association and software company Motion developed and piloted a “Bike Love” mobile app. Bike Love provides daily incentives for active mode first-mile commute trips to transit and active mode commutes from home to work, up to $600 per year per commuter.  

Automated travel mode detection identifies bike, e-bike, e-scooter, and e-skateboard trips. Commute trips are verified to stop or start within geofences at 30 Caltrain stations and two Palo Alto job centers. Incentive dollars are then instantly redeemable at local merchants through a reloadable Apple/Google Wallet Virtual Visa card, a new type of payment card. 

Figures 1 and 2 provide screenshots of the app’s user interface.  

Currently, sixty-seven percent of incentive dollars are spent in Palo Alto, in support of the Palo Alto City Council’s 2022 priority for economic recovery. Over the next few months, the app developer Motion will continue to collect merchant identification numbers as users redeem their rewards. This will allow the app at some point in the future to restrict reward redemptions to Palo Alto businesses only thus recycling all program reward funding back into the local economy.  

Initially, Bike Love incentivized active mobility habits by offering $2.50/day but then raised the reward to $5/day. This increase met with enthusiastic support from the workers the app sought to motivate to try biking to work. 

For more information, visit PATMA’s Bike Love web page.