Northeast Ohioans Challenged to Limit Car Trips During October

Electric cars outside Tri-C earlier this year, a part of NOACA’s region-wide attempt to dissuade Northeast Ohioans from using gas-dependent cars. Credit: Mark Oprea

Feel like getting a chance at swag just for riding a bike or taking RTA?

Well, thanks to the 2024 Lake Eerie Go CAR(bon) FREE Challenge, you can do just that as agencies are incentivizing Northeast Ohioans to curtail—or ideally, eliminate—the use of fossil fuels in their commutes. Bike, carpool, take transit, walk, scooter or just leave the car in the garage for the day and enter to win a chance at gift bags sponsored by Bike Cleveland, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, Laketran, and University Circle, Inc.

Throughout the entirety of next month, any car-owners over 18 in Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain or Medina counties can log their non-auto mileage on Gohio for a chance, at the end of October, to win the swag in weekly drawings as well as a chance at the first, second or third grand prizes for most miles saved. You can log up to four trips a day. Register at gohiocommute.com.

The motivation, of course is “to provide participants the information needed to make smart travel choices, a press release said, “to save money, improve your health and improve air quality.”

Such an effort to bolster the area’s interest in non-carbon transport is a small notch in NOACA’s Climate Action Plan, a regional attempt to reach a national net-zero in carbon emissions by 2050, as set forth last year by the Biden administration.

The attempt also fits into a Cleveland gradually becoming more amenable to alternative forms of transportation, as bike-and-walk-friendly projects come closer into view—like the North Marginal Trail Connector and the Cleveland Moves plan to beef up the city with safer bikeways.

Which Gohio seems to been aiding. In their September rendition, 249 participants logged 26,461 miles of non-car commuting, saving presumably $12,000 in gas costs. And about nine tons of carbon emitted.

Yet, with more than half of Cuyahoga County residents residing in the surburbs, RTA’s paltry reach to those on the fringe might not seem feasible over cars

Heading from Strongsville to the County Building saves, Gohio’s map tells us, six pounds of carbon, yet it takes nearly an hour longer via RTA. (Or, you could just carpool with 11 others who signed up nearby.)

Winners will be announced, NOACA says, on October 31.

Everyone interested can sign up here.