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Paris Velib rider and cycle laneFrance trials paying people to ride bike to work
The French government has formally launched a pilot scheme under which people will be paid to ride a bike to work, and if successful the trial will be expanded in the new year.
The initiative, first announced in March as part of a package of measures aimed at encouraging more people to walk or cycle to work, will see those who choose two wheels paid 25 centimes per kilometre travelled.
10,000 employees in trial
Initially 19 companies and organisations that together have 10,000 employees will be involved in the trial, which will be evaluated at the end of the year and if deemed successful could be expanded in 2015.
The criteria that will determine whether the experiment is eventually rolled out on a larger scale will be based on feedback from employers and workers in four areas:
- Changes in the number of commutes made by bike
- The modes of transport given up in favour of cyling
- Favourable or unfavourable factors concerning the effectiveness of the trial
- Material facilities put in place in different types of organisation
"Encouraging an ecological dynamic"
Launching the trial yesterday, Frédéric Cuvillier, junior minister for transport and the maritime economy at the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development, and Energy, said: "I’m working for the development of all kinds of mobility.
“People are compensated for using public transport or cars to commute from home to work. This large-scale test will enable us to assess whether this approach can also be extended to bikes.
“I hope the bicycle becomes a way of undertaking a whole commute. We’re encouraging an incentivised and ecological dynamic for this soft mode of transport.”
Financial reasons to ride bicycles
France is the latest European country to encourage people to switch to bicycles for commuting through providing a financial incentive to so.
Examples elsewhere include the UK’s Cycle to Work Scheme, which provides a tax-free loan repayable through salary sacrifice to purchase a bike.
In Belgium, meanwhile, employers are permitted (but not obliged) to give their staff a tax-free allowance of 22 centimes for every kilometre they commute to and from their place of work.
In an ongoing trial in Sweden, riders have been loaned bikes for free to see if the barrier to commuting by bike is simply that people have never tried it.
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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9 comments
I'd like to see a government subsidise cycling by handing out envelopes full of cash to cyclists on the road. They'd have to do at random unexpected times and locations. This would subsidise cycling rather than bike purchase, and encourage people who already have bikes to use them more often.
Instead of getting a regular £3 per day subsidy as in france you might expect £100 thirty times a decade, or there could be a range of prize levels to make it more interesting.
"25 centimes per kilometre"?! Seriously? I'd earn 4 euros a day!
It might be more lucrative for me to get a job a couple of hundred kilometres away and just take the cycling money.
The company I'm currently doing work for has a huge issue with parking.
The office is about 2 miles from the city centre in Leeds. Parking that comes with the building is full, they pay a local hotel - 6 min walk away for extra spaces, they pay for a mini bus that does 4 runs morning & evening to the station (the regular bus service is not good)
So why is paying staff to cycle (and free up spaces in the car park and on the mini bus) such an odd concept?
Sets home page to https://www.duolingo.com/course/fr/en
Goddamn.
Mark my words this is not a measure by the French government to save the environment. It is a devious way of finding their next Tour de France winner.
It's been a long time now, 1985 to be exact since a French man won the Tour de France.
This clever way of getting people on to their bikes is just the start. Soon they will be fining people who don't ride their bikes to work at least 3 times a week.
No doubt we will see the French government make it law that all cyclists have to submit their Strava times as soon as they get to and from work. The fastest commuters will be head hunted for future TDF cycling teams.
Love it! haha
Think I'll move to France and work 7 days a week.
HMRC already stamped their approval on it by insisting a 25% min devaluation of bikes when people took the mick at paid 5% of the bikes value in a year,.
just to get this right the C2W scheme is not a tax free loan at all, and FFS dont let HRMC catch onto the fact that this is pretty much how some employers run it, during the "loan period" the asset remains the property of the Employer, and at the end of the agreement, the employer may sell or gift the asset to the employee, however in the case of it being gifted, there are still PAYE liabilities owed.
Im broad terms C2W is a Salary Sacrifice Scheme where the Employer provides a BIKE, not a loan or an opportunity for purchase