Reduction of car use is one of the most effective ways to tackle congestion-related problems. Using positive incentives to stimulate bicycle use is one possibility to reduce car use. Cycling is a sustainable transport mode that uses little space and is healthy. There is evidence that positive incentives may be more effective than punishing travellers for undesirable behaviour, and the emergence of mobile applications for delivering interventions has opened up new opportunities for influencing travellers. So far, few studies have focused on exploring the effectiveness of positive incentives on long-term behavioural change. We used the SMART app to deliver positive incentives to more than 6000 travellers in the Dutch region of Twente. The app automatically tracks users and provides incentives such as challenges with rewards, feedback, and messages. This study covers the period from March 2017 to June 2018, in which more than 1000 SMART users participated in monthly challenges. We evaluated the effects of the challenges and rewards and found that the challenges did encourage cycling and reduced car use in the short term. There is also some evidence for behavioural change over a longer time period. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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During the past century, population and wealth growth have led to the creation of large urban areas in which people and goods are mainly connected by road transport. This has led to urban problems such as congestion and pollution. Public transport can reduce road transport, but the question is whether mass transit can transform cities to a human scale. Together with walking, cycling may be indispensable to develop liveable human scale cities. Through cycling, people can in principle access all locations in neighbourhoods, and thus will be able to connect with their urban environment physically. It is a local activity in itself, it is healthy, and it is more than simply travelling from A to B. It is therefore important to stimulate cycling.Positive interventions or 'soft measures', such as personal travel planning, subsidies, providing feedback, rewards, public transport (PT) discount could stimulate the use of sustainable transport options (e.g., Bamberg and Schmidt, 2003;Cairns et al., 2008). In the age of big data, mobile phones and software platforms are becoming useful tools to collect travel behaviour data and deliver interventions. Global Positioning System (GPS) data from smartphones can be used to estimate travel modes and travel routes accurately (e.g., Biljecki et al., 2013). Moreover, several research projects have used smartphones to deliver interventions (e.g., Bie et al., 2012;Poslad et al., 2015). These interventions include personalized feedback, self-monitoring, challenges and goal-setting, social comparison and rewards.Regarding cycling, Weber et al. (2018), for example, have shown that cycling campaigns in the United States, United Kingdom (UK) and Australia can attract many (potential) cyclists using gamification in smartphone apps. There are also several cycling apps that have a seamless server to end-users,