Don't Be Ridiculous!

How one Swedish city gets people to trade silly car trips for bikes.

A clever public health campaign in Malmö, Sweden, is getting people onto bikes by making them feel silly for driving short distances when they could bike instead.

The challenge: How change ingrained habits, like hopping in the car to get a loaf of bread and some milk at the store just down the street. Malmö's planners wanted to give people a friendly push to leave the two-ton metal boxes at home for shorter trips that could easily be biked.

The campaign, called "No Ridiculous Car Trips," was launched four years ago with the goal of getting people to stop using their cars for journeys of less than 5 kilometers, or about 3 miles. This video does a nice job of explaining how it works:

In the United States, 72 percent of all trips of less than 3 miles are made in cars. For trips of less than 1 mile, the figure is 20 percent.

Ridiculous, right?