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France experiments with paying people to cycle to work
2014 Jun 2, 5:23am 773 views 2 comments
by zzyzzx follow (9)
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Tenpoundbass
2014 Jun 2, 5:34am
OK I get squandering money to get people to ride a bike to work. Because let's be honest here. We're not just a fat species we're also a lazy one riddled with all kinds of health impediment that would make it prohibitive for most to ride a bike to work.
What gets me is the funding to Study "Best Practices"...
Here I'll make it short and sweet.
Point bike in direction of job, run two steps throw your ass on the bike then pedal like a mother fucker until you get there. You better not be late, you got that 9 O'clock.
Here ya go Cap'n. This guy's built an electric cargo bike that can go then distance (and them some, over 50miles) in the Florida heat. No sweat...
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http://news.yahoo.com/france-experiments-paying-people-cycle-160605770.html
PARIS (Reuters) - 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 fossil 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 kilometer and financial support for buying bicycles.
In France, some 20 companies and institutions employing a total of 10,000 people have signed up to pay their staff 25 euro cents (34 U.S. cents) per kilometer biked to work, the transport ministry said in a statement on Monday.
French Transport Minister Frederic Cuvillier, noting that commuting using public transport and cars is already subsidized, said that if results of the test are promising, a second experiment on a larger scale will be done.
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.
In Belgium, where a tax-free bike incentive scheme has been in place for more than five years, about 8 percent of all commutes are on bicycles. In the flat and bicycle-friendly Netherlands, it is about 25 percent, cycling organizations say.
The Brussels-based European Cyclists' Federation has European Union funding to study best practices among various cycling incentive schemes, the group's Bike2Work project manager Randy Rzewnicki said.