Good practice:

Pin Bike - The certified and gamification tool for smart cities

Pin Bike aims to speed up the transition to a cleaner and more eco-sustainable mobility, throughout the certification of the kilometres travelled by personal bicycles for bike-to-work and bike-to-school routes, made by its anti-fraud patent hardware tracking system. It positively involves public administrations, businesses and citizens in a virtuous economic circle. Pin Bike is a practical and reliable bicycle traffic certification patented system. It allows the monitoring of urban bike traffic and reports on which days, where and how, users were headed to work or school. Incentives can be earned by users only within the selected urban area. The municipality can customize its initiatives with double or triple points, according to certain periods of the year or on certain days or times, or even according to users’ age. The project was conceived as a dynamic reward system that values cycling and promotes sustainable mobility solutions for citizens. Two actors are necessary: Users and the Organization (such as Municipalities, a Regional Government, School, University or a Company). Other actors can be Local Shops, Public Transport Companies but also interested Companies, Theatres, etc. since the vouchers given to the citizens can be spent exclusively on commercial activities in the city. In a smart city way, the system becomes quantifiable and instrumental in the perfect planning of urban traffic. It is, therefore, possible to evaluate which urban routes are most used by bicycle

Development of technological infrastructure is € 220k to date. The resources that Organization allocate are variable and inclusion of local shops + management of refunds impact the final price. The total price of the project is divided approx. 30-50% for kits and systems and 50-70% for incentives.

Municipality of Corato, Bari, Bergamo, Foggia, Pescara, Collegno and 11 Municipalities of the Metropolitan Area of Turin, high school and Bologna local health unit company activated Pin Bike. More than € 752 k of rewards were issued. System has reached an average of up to 7 km/day/person. Compared to the rewards defined by Organizations (20 -30 € cent/km), the average cost for each km is around 7€ cent/km which means that users continue to pedal even after reaching the max reimbursement quota

The biggest challenge was communication. In the beginning, the citizens did not believe it was possible for the Municipality to issue incentives for the use of private bikes. Thanks to word-of-mouth, the obstacle has been overcome and Pin Bike became popular, saturating the number of registrations.

As amply demonstrated by the variety of both projects already active and soon to be activated, the system has been designed to be scalable with the possibility of being able to apply it in any context, not only municipal but also business and school.
The methods of application are repeatable and adapt to any urban and social environment.

The project can also be customized to adapt to client's needs, being able to decide:
- the rules, rewards,
- deadlines,
- target users (workers / students / by age / etc.),
- the perimeter of the urban area for the release of rewards,
- the types of journeys allowed (free time or only journeys for work),
- whether to include in the gamification system kick-scooters, carpooling activity, public transport (function currently being implemented).