Metro Will Pay Up to $600 to Keep One Car Parked

Pre-registration for the five-week One Car Challenge has closed, with up to 2,000 Los Angeles County households in line.

Los Angeles County households can earn as much as $600 for keeping one car parked five weeks. Metro's One Car Challenge pays up to $120 a week and disburses at the end, according to the agency's August 4, 2026 announcement. Up to 2,000 households are in line. Pre-registration has closed.

Picture the household it's built for: two cars in the driveway, one of them left alone from Monday to Monday, five weeks running, with the payment arriving at the finish rather than each Friday.

The reward is per household, not per person. A family of four that parks its second car earns the same ceiling as a couple that does.

Metro's release calls the money "dynamically disbursed upon completion." So $600 is a ceiling, not a rate.

The funding behind it is a $2 million REAP 2.0 grant from the Southern California Association of Governments. Two thousand households at the maximum would come to $1.2 million. That's roughly 60 cents of every grant dollar reaching a participant, if every household hits the top of the range.

Eligibility runs to county residents 21 and older. Metro says the pilot is aimed at multi-car households, though single-car households can apply too. Travel is tracked through the smartphone app from Metro's partner GoCarma, using automated or photographed odometer readings. Those readings are how a household proves the car stayed put.

Phase 1 ran in Santa Monica in 2023 with 300 households. The countywide round is close to seven times that size. Metro credits the first round with participants 2.6 times more likely to leave an extra vehicle at home, and reports a 16.16% rise in walking, biking and transit use. Those are the agency's own figures.

Spectrum News 1 carried the same terms in an August 5, 2026 report from City News Service. It listed the same numbers: up to $600, or as much as $120 a week.

No start date has been posted for the five weeks.

Metro's sign-up page says pre-registration is closed, that the households it selects will hear from the agency directly, and that a revised program timeline is coming shortly.

Source: thesource.metro.net.