BetterPoints wins Healthy Streets Award for modal shift
We are proud to announce we won the award for modal shift at last night’s Healthy Streets Awards in London, for our work on the BikeSmart programme in Reading. (You can see a smiling Chris Bristow, our Chief Operating Officer, on the right of the photograph, accepting the award.)
BikeSmart is run by Reading Borough Council with funding from the European H2020 Empower initiative, to encourage people to cycle more and to help them do so. BetterPoints was commissioned to help them increase levels of engagement and impact.
We were involved for six months, between February and August 2017. In that time, more than 600 people actively took part and made 30,000 cycle journeys. Together, they cycled 331,762 miles, which is equivalent to 13 times around the planet!
Reportedly, nearly 7,000 of those journeys replaced a car journey, which will have saved around nine tonnes of CO2 emissions.
418 of the participants responded to our end-of-programme survey. Of those, 271 – 65% – told us BikeSmart had encouraged them to change their travel behaviour.
We also delivered more than 60 cycle skills workshops across the town with Avanti Cycling, and ran a weekly cycle session for the local charity, Sport in Mind.
We are excited by these results, and delighted that the Healthy Streets Awards have acknowledged the contribution our incentivised behaviour change system can bring to sustainable transport.
The annual Healthy Streets Awards are run by the transport and infrastructure agency, Landor LINKS, to ‘recognise and reward excellence in the planning and delivery of Healthy Street improvements in towns and cities in Great Britain and Ireland’.
