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Commuter Challenge / Summary (This will be the title of the page, not a heading)
Commuter Challenge is a non-government event held annually during the Canadian National Environment Week. Formatted as a friendly competition between municipalities, workplaces, and individuals, the Commuter Challenge is designed to encourage participants to switch their daily commutes to alternative, sustainable modes of transportation. The event has a strong workplace focus where employers promote and support their employees in walking, jogging, cycling, in-line skating, taking transit, carpooling and teleworking.

It is organized and run by Calgary-based environmental advocacy group Sustainable Alberta Association. Participants record their commutes and are ranked via Sustainable Alberta's web-based tracking tools. 25,037 individuals and 1524 workplaces participated in the 2012 Commuter Challenge.

History
Small sustainable transportation events started in the early 1990s in different cities across the country; all under different names and in different formats. The "Commuter Challenge" began during the 1991 National Environment Week at the |Alberta Energy Utility Board in Calgary as an interdepartmental competition to promote alternative transportation options. In 1992 the AEUB challenged three other workplaces in Calgary to a friendly competition to see which workplace had the highest percent of sustainable commuters. By 1995 the Calgary Challenge had mushroomed to include 25 major workplaces and had caught the interest of groups in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver. Pollution Probe’s Toronto Commuter event took off and in the early nineties they created a template for their program and traveled across the country sharing the idea with other municipalities including Ottawa, Edmonton and Vancouver. The Ottawa and Vancouver campaigns also flourished and the program continued to spread to other municipalities through word of mouth of workplace coordinators and through the organizations who were hosting city events. In 1997, Calgary challenged Vancouver, Ottawa and London to an informal intercity challenge which attracted some media attention.

In 1998 the Calgary Commuter Challenge team (now operating under the name Sustainable Alberta Association) applied for three years of funding through the Climate Change Action Fund (CCAF) to grow the event and develop an on-line data collection system that combined existing city campaign formats and make it easy for new cities and workplaces to participate in the event, collect data and present results. By 2000, twenty Canadian Cities had signed up for the event with host organizations ranging from not-for-profit environmental groups, municipal offices and health regions.

Impacts
† Data for 2009 and 2010 include fuel, insurance, and maintenance costs, based on numbers provided by Natural Resources Canada of $1.00/L of fuel.

Partner Organizations
Commuter Challenge has had many partners over the years. Major support is received annually though collaboration with the City of Calgary, notably their transportation department. Significant long-term partners also include BEST, who organizes the Commuter Challenge for cities in the province of British Columbia; the Green Action Centre who organizes in the province of Manitoba; and Clean Nova Scotia organizes the event in the province of Nova Scotia. In 2012 Commuter Challenge partnered with C3-Climate Change Central, another Alberta-based environmental advocacy group, to give away Air Miles to randomly chosen participants. In 2011 Sustainable Alberta Association lobbied for, and received, a Shell ‘Fuelling Change’ grant of $100,000 to put towards the development of mobile software.