Italian town plans to pay people to cycle to work
Digital Reporter
Monday, November 16, 2015, 11:18 AM - The Italian town of Massarossa wants cars off the road so much, they will literally pay residents to bike to work.
As the BBC reports, the town plans a 12-month pilot focusing on 50 workers. Each will be paid 25 cents per kilometre, tracked via a smartphone app, up to a monthly cap of 50 euros ($72).
That doesn't sound like much, but it would amount to maximum annual savings of around $860, not to mention factoring in the money saved on gas.
The town council voted to fund the plan using fines from traffic tickets, which the BBC says has to be invested in road safety programs by law.
It's the latest attempt by a European city to reduce the number of people driving regularly.
The BBC says a similar scheme was attempted in France last year, and while the numbers of cyclists did increase, most of them had been either carpooling or taking public transit anyway, so the total number of cars on the road didn't go down by much.
Paris banned most cars for a single day in September in an attempt to combat pollution. Earlier this month, the newly-elected city council of the Norwegian capital Oslo announced plans to ban cars from the downtown by 2019.
SOURCE: BBC News
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