[Courtesy of Seoul Metropolitan Government]
The program encourages citizens to voluntarily reduce the use of personal vehicles. Participants are required to hand over mileage information to the city office every year. City officials will calculate the reduction rate of travel distance, and up to 70,000 points are given as incentives. Reward points can be used for paying taxes and making donations.
Some 170,000 car owners have participated in the program since it was launched in 2017. A total travel distance of 634 million kilometers (2.1 billion miles) was reduced thanks to participants who chose to minimize the usage of personal vehicles. The reduced mileage is equivalent to reducing 144,663 tons of carbon dioxide.
Seoul said in a statement on November 26 that it would work with Hyundai to establish an interlinked system for the mileage program and the auto group's connected vehicle management app called "datahub" so that operation information such as total mileage can be hooked onto program data. Hyundai's vehicle data app will autonomously upload vehicle mileage information. The automatic upload will start in the first quarter of 2022.
The city government predicts that some 200,000 datahub app users will join Seoul's greenhouse gases reduction program. "We will continue to establish government-private cooperation to go fully carbon neutral by 2050," Seoul's environmental energy planning bureau director Lee In-keun was quoted as saying.
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
