Washington region employers will compete on transit ridership this spring. Is yours on board?

March Madness is on the horizon, and right after that will be Earth Month. While we prepare to watch players pursue hoop dreams, some of us are thinking on the regional and even planetary levels. Could some of that exciting competitive atmosphere be turned into a win for cutting transportation emissions and improving mobility in the Washington region?

That’s what the Ride for the Region challenge is about. Employers, including universities, nonprofits, public and private organizations throughout the District, Maryland and Virginia, are invited to take part in this friendly competition to get more folks riding and enjoying regional transit services. Ride for the Region is looking for organizations and companies, committed to regional sustainability, to sign up as our Elite 8 Bracket by March 15.

How will it work?

The competition will kick off on Monday, April 1. In a bracket format, participating organizations will go head-to-head with comparable institutions to see who can generate the most transit trips each week.

Sustainability is a team sport. For this challenge, individual riders simply have to log their trips taken on any bus or rail service using the incenTrip app starting Monday, April 1. The goal is to help their organization deliver the most trips over the course of a week. Transit trips taken by all participants within each organization will be calculated weekly, and the organization with the highest proportion of transit trips as a team over a one-week period will advance to the next round!

To learn more, all you need to do is identify an Employer Team Captain and join our webinar on March 8, 11 am–12 pm. You can also find out more here.

The coordinating Task Force will provide updates on the impact of employer participation in terms of total trips taken and greenhouse gas reduction benefits. Participating employers may also choose to use the incenTrip app to provide their own incentives for participating employees.

Why we’re doing this

In November, on WMATA’s request, the Advanced Energy Group that I lead convened a transportation summit at WMATA headquarters. Our goal was to come up with one high-impact, time-limited initiative to reduce transportation emissions in the region. We rapidly zeroed in on mode shift–among several excellent options such as charging infrastructure for electric vehicles–as a critical area of focus.

By forming employer “teams” rather than people taking part as individuals (as the annual TranspoBingo challenge so impressively does each year) and focusing on trips as the key metric, we’re highlighting the important relationship between a thriving regional transit system and employers throughout the Washington region–and how that synergy pays off for reducing emissions.

We’ve got lots of help available for this new challenge, including tutorials on using the incenTrip platform that will log trips. Staff from the Metropolitan Washington Council of Government’s Commuter Connections have stood up to assist Employer Team Captains with creating accounts and logging those trips. Join us for the webinar if you’d like to learn more.

Employers of the Washington region, the ball’s in your court. Let’s see if your team’s ready to show off their transit chops and celebrate a needed win for sustainability.

Disclosure: Greater Greater Washington is participating on a voluntary basis in the task force that created this challenge.