Mobility credits
Do you remember how, before the pandemic, you couldn’t move in central London for people offering you a free trial of Hello Fresh?
Did you claim it? Me too. Did you become a regular? No, me neither…
But for everyone like us, they’ll be someone who gets hooked and stays.
When at Chiltern Railways, we used free trials as part of the launch of Oxford Parkway. At Snap, we offered anyone a first trip free.
But public transport has traditionally held back from free trials, in large part because the lack of robust customer data has made it hard to target discounts at genuinely new customers.
But Coventry city council is now starting to show the way. They have introduced a mobility credits scheme that gives £3,000 of public transport and car hire credits to anyone who scraps an old diesel or very old petrol car.
At the moment, the scheme is tightly geographically bounded but it points the way to a real opportunity for behaviour change.
Stop them before they start
Using mobility credits as a scrappage incentive is an interesting idea but it’s not without risk.
Getting rid of a car is something that most people won’t do lightly. It requires fundamental changes to almost every aspect of life. How will the children get to school? How will I get to work or to the station? What about kids’ activities? And seeing the in-laws? And going on holiday? And, and, and….
It’s likely that someone is only going to give up a car if they’re pretty sure it’s the right thing to do, so it might be that the £3k ends up being a reward to people who’d have made that decision anyway. What is most needed is a way of stopping people forming habits that then need to be painfully unwound.
Luckily, we know when those moments occur.
Moving house is a critical moment. All your existing habits are thrown in the air and you need to form new ones. If every new householder also recieved a bundle of ‘use it or lose it’ mobility credits valid for the first 2 months after they move into a neighbourhood, they’d have the chance to trial car-free living before they get the chance to enroll little Tequila in a ballet class that can’t be reached by bus.
The other ‘moment’ is having children. It is almost an article of faith that you “can’t” live car-free and not drive. As a car-free father of two, I challenge this assertion. A bundle of time-limited mobility credits when the first baby arrives would create an incentive to try out journeys by public transport and save on the fuel bill.
Luckily both moving house and having children involve state registration processes, meaning it’s pretty easy to identify entitlement.
A cost that pays for itself
Each year there are roughly 1.1 million home sales and 0.6 million babies born. If each of these events came with £500 of mobility credits, that would cost about £850 million each year.
Let’s assume that 50% of recipients actually use the vouchers, and that 10% of these then went on to stay as public transport users who would otherwise have become car owners and spend an average of £2k per household on public transport fares, that would generate enough new fares revenue per year to cover the cost in just two years. After five years, the scheme would be generating double its cost in new ticket revenue.
These numbers are obviously imprecise and they do not take into account the investment needed in new capacity to accomodate these users. But that investment needs to be incurred anyway, if we’re to meet our climate goals.
Mobility credits could be a very cost-effective way of stimulating the required behaviour change.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’m not a fan of Mobility-as-a-Service simply because it gives the impression that something is easy that is in fact very difficult. But that doesn’t mean the goal of making public transport as easy as the car is the wrong one: absolutely not.
Mobility credits should be part of the armoury.
