How Helsinki’s ‘Mobility on Demand’ Service Could Make Car Ownership Obsolete
A lot of people already do the planning part with the app formerly called a "brain." But still pretty interesting. The single-payment angle seems new.
Helsinki, the capital of Finland, has a a plan that might make car ownership a thing of the past.
Which is not to say it would eliminate the need for riding in cars. Rather, Helsinkis plan is to provide its residents with a smartphone app that can knit together all the different transportation options in the city subways, buses, taxis, ferries, car sharing services, bike sharing services, etc into one complete trip from Point A to Point B. Users would input an origin and a destination, and the app would plot out their trip, along with which modes of transportation theyd use, according to their preferences, their available time, the weather, and other variables. Payments could be structured in different ways by the kilometer, by the trip, or as a monthly fee, for instance but in every instance the user would be making one single payment via the app rather than paying for each mode of transport individually.
Essentially, it would be a one-stop-shop marketplace for transportation similar to what Obamacare is trying to achieve for health insurance with its exchanges.
The idea is called mobility on demand planning out transportation across public, private, and shared systems, all as a service delivered to customers. And because the primary value of owning a car is the convenience of immediately available transportation 95 percent of the average cars life is spent sitting idle proponents think Helsinkis system, if sufficiently successful and effective, could more or less eliminate the need for car ownership among the citys residents.
In 2012, Helsinki debuted a program that could serve as a prelude for mobility on demand, called Kutsuplus. (Finnish for call plus.) Its a system of minibuses, coordinated by computer, that can be called up by a smartphone app. Users can designate a start point, end point, and whether theyd like to ride by themselves or not. The cost is a $4.75 user fee plus 60 cents per kilometer more than a standard Helsinki bus fare, but less than a taxi ride. The system actually wasnt meant to end car use but to make it easier to get to public transportation, and was serving 4,500 people as of September 2013.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/08/05/3467538/helsinki-car-mobility/