3 October 2016

Assignment 5: 3 interesting products/services concerning mobility



Before trying to work on concepts in order to reduce the CO­2­ emissions, it is necessary to determine the sector that is the highest emission source in an area to reach with the elaborated concept the biggest impact.
Due to our current state of knowledge and some conferences with our client, we assume that the mobility sector has the biggest influence on the CO2 emissions and therefore we present three approaches to tackle this issue.
 

1. Increase the attractiveness of public transportation

An attractive public transportation system contributes to a reduction of vehicles in use and traffic on the streets and reduces as a consequence the CO2 emissions. However, which are the factors which affect the attractiveness of public transportation?
- Price
- Frequency
- Connections
- Individual added value:
                    - Time for recreation
                    - Sensation of acting sustainable
                    - Wifi for entertainment, work etc.
                    - Route planner application
                    - Timetable at stations


2. City Bikes in Hamburg /StadtRad Hamburg



The StadtRad, which means city bike in English, is a great addition to the public transport. The people living in Hamburg and visiting it now have the possibility to not only use trains, buses and ferries to move around the city, but they are also able to bike everywhere they need to go. This completes the public transportation service to a great extend. With 2.300 bicycles it is the most used bike rental service in Germany. 350.000 people use it over 2.5 million times a year. On high-usage days every bike is used up to 7 times a day.
Every registered user can borrow a bike at any of the 200 Stations, to return the bike one has to bring it back to a station. This does sound stressful in the beginning, but looking at the locations of these return points it is never a problem to return the bike in the wider area of the city center.

The best thing about the StadtRad is that the first half hour of every rental is free, with eight cents for every additional minute and a maximum of 12€ a day. Furthermore, if you need a bike for example for 45 minutes and there is a station on your way, you can just return your bike and some point during your ride and rent a new one for 30 additional minutes free of charge. Most rides through Hamburg do not take 30 minutes, but if it does take longer this is a very handy trick. The system is used by a lot of people who would like to move around the city spontaneous, healthy and sustainable. For myself I had only good experiences using StadtRad.
Website StadtRad Hamburg




3. Carsharing

  Carsharing services are available in over a thousand cities all over the world. As of December 2012, there were an estimated 1.7 million car-sharing members. The world’s largest carsharing network across North Amercia and Europe are zipcar (767,000 members/11,000 vehicles) and Car2Go (900,000 members/12,000 cars). The main factors driving the growth of carsharing are the rising levels of congestion faced by city inhabitants; shifting generational mind-sets about car ownership; the increasing costs of personal vehicle. Carsharing contributes to sustainable transport because it is a less care intensive means of urban transport. Carsharing can also reduce the car ownership at an estimated rate of one rental car replacing 15 owned vehicles(according to The Economist).
Carsharing is a model of car rental where people rent cars for short periods of time, often by hour/day. Carsharing is attractive to people who occasional make use of a vehicle. The organization renting the cars may be a commercial business or the users may be organized as a company, public agency cooperative. Government is also a stakeholder that can be a provider of cars.


2 comments:

  1. hello we have used this blogpost as a source for our assignment 6.
    this is our feedback on the carsharing article:

    A good point in your finding are the numbers your group used in the carsharing article. It is interesting to see that you have far more members than vehicles. You also made it stronger by giving some good advantages on carsharing.
    Next time try to find more reliable information, the information you used is from 2012 and it’s almost 2017. Second the disadvantages of carsharing. We are currious if this concept is working well. According to the numbers you have far more members than vehicles. So does this work out well is our question?

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  2. hello we have used this blogpost as a source for our assignment 6.
    this is our feedback on the public transportation article:

    This article really matches your project so we think that you guys can actually get some very valuable information when taking a closer look into the actual concept. When more people would actually use public transport instead of having their own car, CO2 emissions will actually decrease.
    If you guys are really planning on using this information for your project the only advise that we can give you is to look closer into the different factors. You have summed up a few, but I can imagine there being more factors than the ones you have mentioned.

    ReplyDelete