Motivating Energy Efficient Travel: A Community-Based Intervention for Encouraging Biking

By promoting safe, energy-efficient travel modes, environmental problems associated with extensive usage of the automobile can be reduced. The effectiveness of a practical incentive strategy for increasing biking and walking on a community bicycle path was evaluated. During a three-week baseline condition, frequencies of biking and walking were observed at two bikeways in a university setting. Then an incentive intervention with an innovative scheme for preventing cheating or circumvention was implemented at one of these pathways for a three-week period, followed by a three-week withdrawal period. The incentive phase was announced in local newspapers and on distributed handbills. Results indicated that during the incentive period, biking frequency at the experimental bike path was significantly greater than during preand post-incentive conditions, relative to observed biking on the control bikeway. Further, the pattern of daily biking frequencies during the incentive phase indicated that the increase in biking was directly related to the administration of certain prompting procedures. The cost effectiveness of the behavioral intervention is discussed with reference to communitywide application. The extensive use of the private automobile has numerous ecological, economical and safety liabilities. Passenger cars alone are responsible for 27 per cent of the annual consumption of petroleum and natural gas in the U.S. [1 ] . Twenty-five to 30 per cent of the land in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Washington is devoted to roads and parking spaces for cars [2]. Additionally, *This research served as partial fulfillment for the first author's Master of Science degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia-the second author was chairperson of the thesis committee.