Vienna’s Cultural Approach to Going Car-Free

Leave your car at home and we’ll let you visit a museum or theater for free. That’s the offer from the city of Vienna to those who travel on foot, bike, or public transit. Starting as a pilot project next month, Vienna’s “Culture Token” will track users’ movements—and their chosen mode of transit—across the city via an app. For each car-free kilometer the user travels, the app stores up credits. Once the user has stored up 20 kilograms of carbon savings—possible with about two weeks of car-free commuting—they get a token they can exchange for a ticket to various arts venues, including Vienna’s most respected concert hall, theater, and contemporary art venue.

There's no limit to the number of tokens that can be accrued by users, who will initially number 1,000 as a test for a possible wider roll-out in the autumn. But once each app account has gathered five tokens, each participant will have to use one before earning more.