This app pays you for commuting. Here’s what happened when I used it.
Commuters on a bus in DC by Oren Levine licensed under Creative Commons.
For the last few months, I’ve been getting paid to commute to work.
The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, along with the University of Maryland, released a smartphone app called incenTrip, which officially started servicing the region in August 2019. Commuters can earn points simply by traveling to work, whether it’s by bus, bike, walking, carpooling, or even driving a car, and they can redeem those points for money.
The goal is “to help advance regional priorities like reducing traffic congestion, energy use, and vehicle emissions,” Steve Kania, a communications manager at COG, told me by email. “It’s one of many transportation demand management (TDM) programs by Commuter Connections that promote alternative modes of travel.”
The project was funded by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency with a $4.5 million grant.
Since the summer, I’ve received two checks for $50 each, and I’ve redeemed enough points for two more that haven’t arrived in the mail yet.
A snapshot of the incenTrip app shows a commuting trip during rush hour earns more points than the same trip outside of rush hour. Screen shots by the author. Image by the author.
How the app works
IncenTrip doles out points that vary by mode of transportation. Driving oneself in a car earns the fewest points, while taking other methods earns more. My office is about two miles from home, and I usually walk, which earns the most points possible.
Using the app is fairly straightforward. I enter my origin and my destination, and then the app displays a list of transportation modes and routes, and points associated with each. This tends to work best for biking, walking, or riding a bus.
A few hiccups
Incentrip does not award points when the route I take doesn’t follow the route the app recommended, such as if I’m taking a ride-hailing service and the driver makes unexpected turns. I’ve run into the same issue when taking Metro rail, which I suspect is a result of underground connectivity issues.
A trip earns the most points when it is during rush hour and ends at work or at home. This can make it tricky when I want to stop somewhere on the way home, like if I want to go to the supermarket. A trip from work to the grocery store earns a fraction of the points that a trip from work to home gets. Trips at other times can earn points too, and so can trips that don’t start or end at work or home, but they don’t get as many as commuting.
There are other opportunities to earn bonus points for meeting goals such as taking a certain number of non-driving trips in a week and participating in events like Car Free Day.
Some fun and vexing features of the app
One of the features I like is the ability to schedule trips in advance. Incentrip sends notifications starting about 15 minutes before the scheduled time to remind me to open the app and begin logging the trip. I find it helpful in the morning when I’m rushing to leave for work on time and I may forget to activate the app without that reminder.
If I don’t schedule a trip in advance, I can still record it by opening the app and pressing the start button. But there have been rare occasions when I can’t log a trip because app freezes up. And one of the more annoying aspects is that there is no way to earn points for a trip I forgot to log at the time of the trip. If I make it all the way to my destination and realize I didn’t activate the app at the beginning of the trip, there is no way to earn those points.
One major shortcoming is that the app does nothing to incentivize telework as an environmentally friendly option. Because points are awarded for traveling from point A to point B, a user cannot earn points for working from home. But traveling to a coffee shop or a coworking space can earn points like any other trip would.
It’s hard to tell whether this app is actually accomplishing its goal. I can say that for me, I don’t think it has made a difference because I don’t own a car; I take greener trips in part because I have to. But in the aggregate, I couldn’t get information about how many users have switched to greener transportation methods because of the app.
Still, Kania told me that there were 757 requests for payment that had been screened or were being screened as of the fourth quarter of 2019, and 365 payments had been disbursed as of Nov. 29.
I hope that Commuter Connections finds useful data in its evaluation of whether incenTrip is motivating people to commute without driving. Everyone benefits from fewer cars on the region’s roads.