Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Our GoCarma smartphone app is used by more than 85,000 commuters in Dallas-Fort Worth to qualify for incentives for changing their driving behavior in ways that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The smartphone automatically verifies travel at certain locations and times and applies in-app incentives for behaviors such as high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) travel, peak-period avoidance, congested route avoidance, modal shift to transit, and travel avoidance when air quality degrades below threshold levels. 

We have partnered with local, state, and federal government agencies to offer meaningful incentives. This includes partnerships with the regional metropolitan planning organization, North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), the federal highway administration (FHWA), Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA).

This public-private partnership means that commuters can benefit from valuable incentives to change their driving behavior, such as a 50% HOV toll discount during weekday peak periods, as well as Amazon / Visa gift cards. 

By automatically verifying the desired travel behaviors at certain locations and times, the project ensures reliable delivery of incentives only to those commuters who actually change their travel behavior. With oversight by the Texas A&M Univeristy Transportation Institute (TTI), the project has been recognized for its significant impact by International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike (IBTTA) with its Toll Excellence award for Private Sector Innovation. This is the global toll industry's leading prize for private sector innovation, indicating the scale-up opportunity for the project to expand its impact globally.

We believe that road pricing offers the best and fastest opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, the largest source of emissions in the United States. Our project in Dallas-Fort Worth launched in 2020 and has resulted in 50.4 million lbs of CO2 savings by reducing vehicle miles traveled by 57.2 million miles. That's equivalent to 0.45% of energy use by Dallas homes for one year, or 381,025 tree seedlings grown for 10 years. 

For us, this is a great start - but we have global ambitions and we're now working to scale up our impact across the United States and Europe.

How Project Affects Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions:

['Reduces GHGs (e.g., projects that reduce sources of GHGs, such as through efficiency or other changes in consumption)']

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

By facilitating dynamic road pricing, our GoCarma solution enables agencies to offer affordable pricing for low-income and transit-underserved communities. Our GoCarma app may be used to offer incentives or discounts to those communities, with real-time eligibility verification. Often the people who have to drive the furthest are from those communities, so GoCarma has great potential to target incentives for those communities and help reduce the emissions from their commutes.

The data that we provide government partners is also relevant, as it enables those agencies to make better decisions about where to invest transportation funding - based on real travel patterns and road user sentiment. The GoCarma app enables agencies to reach out directly to commuters to announce incentives, warn of degraded air quality, or to advise about road incidents.