SoftCommute: How the Municipality of Differdange uses an innovative token-based rewards system to reduce mobility-related carbon footprint

The Responsible Organisations

The Municipality of Differdange is Luxembourg’s third biggest city and offers a range of municipal services to its citizens, including citizens services, creative and sports facilities, education and childcare facilities, environmental department, housing, internal departments, and social services. 

The problem

The climate crisis has prompted the development of several initiatives (e.g., under the EU Green Deal priorities) towards the decrease of CO2 emissions, and the adoption of ecofriendly practices. However, adequate incentives to promote long-term shifts in daily habits often lack response and immediate results.. In particular, in many cities the predominant commuting mode are still private motorised transports, which have a large carbon footprint. 

Considering this, monetary incentives are considered as usually effective and attractive for most people and can be used as creative solutions to trigger broader changes in individual habits, social mindsets around transport and commute, and more sustainable urban dynamics.

In this context, the emergence of Blockchain appears to bear a largely unexplored potential to design mechanisms that allow token-based monetary rewards that are linked to the goals of climate action and environmental policies. Blockchain consists of a decentralised database that is shared and managed across multiple nodes or computers in a network, where participants in the network have decentralised control over the data, and numerous nodes participate in the distribution, administration, and exchange of data. Blockchain finds an emerging field of application in regards to cryptocurrencies and tokens.

The solution and its implementation

1. Survcoin

The Survcoin was deployed for the first time in 2018 as part of a pilot project in Luxembourg led by the association Climate Action Blockchain, created in August 2017 to explore the potential of blockchain for climate action. During that project, participants had the opportunity to test for the first time how to obtain and spend Survcoins with the project’s partners.

Later, in 2021, the Survcoin has been introduced in the context of the pilot project “MobiDiff”, the Softcommute pilot project based in the Municipality of Differdange, a city of slightly less than 30,000 inhabitants. The project aimed at incentivising soft mobility – whether by foot, by bike, by train or by bus – among city administration’s employees. 

At the moment, SoftCommute is in its beta phase, with about forty users involved, in order to guarantee the proper functioning of the application, and in particular the detection of commuting trips and the modes of transportation. In the near future, the project will be scaled to include all the employees of the Differdange administration (+/- 800 people). By the end of 2024, SoftCommute is planned to become available for everyone working, living or studying in Differdange. 

Pilot participants are rewarded in Survcoins based on their individual contribution to reducing CO2 emissions while commuting. The core goal of the project is to increase the use of soft mobility among employees in order to reduce the high emissions caused by the use of private cars as well as traffic jams. The City Council is also counting on the positive impact on health produced by an increased use of active mobility. The users can then spend the Survcoins accumulated in their electronic wallet in local businesses that are partners of the project. Local businesses participating in the programme mostly commercialise organic food products, coffee and bakery items, flowers, plants, clothing items,and bike maintenance, among others. The municipality of Differdange supports this decarbonising loop by reimbursing shop owners who participate in the pilot. 

3. SoftCommute and the introduction of blockchain

Building on the experience gained with MobiDiff, SoftCommute is planned to extend and enhance the reward system introduced with MobiDiff by including activities of gamification, to generate and maintain user engagement with the platform. In fact, arrays of quizzes, challenges (individual and collective), lotteries, treasure-hunting, halls of fame and other games are designed to keep the interest alive and gradually shift people’s incentives from a reward-based motivation to larger cultural shift rooted in the feeling of contributing to the whole community.

During the current deployment phase, Survcoin is not yet based on a blockchain as this did not appear to be crucial. Efforts focused on the platform’s indispensable features such as mobility detection and Survcoin-based transactions. However, the plan is to migrate the emitting and trading platform to a permissioned, low-consumption digital ledger once a critical mass of token emissions and participants is reached. In this perspective, the migration of the token systems to a blockchain is expected to give users the guarantee that their efforts towards decarbonisation, as materialised in the emitted tokens, will not be lost or corrupted. In this regard, blockchain has in fact the capacity to increase the security, traceability, and validity of the tokens emitted to users.

A number of existing blockchain models that would be eligible for this project have been already identified. The nano-transactions permissioned in these models to reward soft mobility and to spend/redeem tokens should take place without a level of energy consumption that would nullify the environmental benefits of users’ behaviour. This would mean that a finalised transaction on the platform would need to be irreversible and non-censurable, but at the same time have an energy footprint equal or smaller than a credit card swipe. Developments in this field are being tracked to be able to switch the actual token systems to Blockchain once requirements are fulfilled. 

Expected benefits

SoftCommute is planned to offer a wide range of benefits to the municipality of Differdange:

• Carbon footprint reduction through the engagement of its citizens to a sustainable and climate-friendly behaviour.
• Traffic jams reduction because of an increase in soft mobility.
• Positive impact on the physical and mental condition of users, which are expected to be encouraged to carry out healthy activities, such as walking or cycling to work. In addition, time spent outdoor is linked to lower levels of physical stress.
• Promotion of local businesses as users can spend the rewards they earned and accumulated in their electronic wallet with local businesses that are partners of the project.
• Parking space decreased demand in the city centre.

Main challenges

The main challenges that have been identified across the development of the project are:

• Protection of users’ private data. To minimise the risk of unauthorised access or misuse of users’ sensitive data,  the platform has been designed to retain personal data (i.e. participants’ times of departure, arrival, itineraries, or transactions) only during the time needed to calculate the rewards. In addition, identification of the users and the sharing of their data is only foreseen with their express consent and in the context of clearly defined gamification scenarios.
• Refinement of the rewards system. When initially deployed, the application was not able to differentiate the transport mode, the distance, and the frequency of commutes. For this reason, every eligible commute was rewarded with the same amount of Survcoins. Since the objective is to reward users for their respective CO2 saving, SoftCommute switched to a differentiated rewards system, which considers the mode of transport, the distance and the regularity of commutes. Regarding to the mode of transport, users receive a bigger reward if they use active mobility such as walking or biking, compared to car-pooling or public transports. Furthermore, users who perform more than 5 soft mobility commutes per week receive higher rewards as an award for their regularity. The introduction machine learning (ML) technologies is planned to optimise the impact of rewards obtained by the users.
• Other challenges that had to be tackled were the correct detection of the transport mode, the development and integration of a car-pooling module, and the installation of low energy Bluetooth beacons in the public transport to track users’ movements.

• SoftCommute official website
• MobiDiff project