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We have written to the Scottish Parliament’s new Covid-19 Committee detailing what the shared transport sector is doing to help key workers leading the fight against coronavirus, and highlighted the potential role the sector can play in retaining and enhancing some of the environmental gains that we’ve seen as a result of the lockdown. You can read the full text of the letter below.
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UPDATE 27.08.20:  This page outlines the amazing response from Shared Mobility operators to support key workers at the height of the pandemic. The sector acted incredibly fast to ensure cars and bikes were available to staff as they needed them for little or no cost. Latest positions of offers are added below alongside the original offers for the record.

  April 2020: We are in uncharted waters as a country.  During this crisis, CoMoUK is engaging with the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments to stress the societal and climate crisis benefits that shared transport brings and the unprecedented impact this will have on the sector. Shared mobility providers are responding to the crisis by providing essential transport services for NHS, care workers and food delivery services. Here are the examples we are aware of so far:  

Car share

  Enterprise Car Club until 3rd August offered FREE membership & up to 45% off hourly rental rates* to personnel across the NHS, Emergency Services, NHS Volunteers, Armed Forces as well as any other key workers. This saves these essential employees up to £60 when they join and an average across the vehicle classes of £3.14/hour and £19.90/day”   Read more here.   Co-wheels Car Club is offering all NHS care staff such as doctors, nurses and paramedics, plus NHS Volunteers and all front line carers, such as home helps and staff in care homes, 50% off bookings. Read more here.    Zipcar worked with all NHS trusts to give all NHS staff up to 50% off journeys with Zipcar. Read more here   Ubeeqo provided vehicles to councils and other organisations delivering essential services for a range of tasks, including for prescription deliveries, non-urgent patient transfers and food-bank deliveries. To support further, Ubeeqo offered up to 50% off the standard contract rate for organisations delivering essential services as part of the fight against Coronavirus. Read more here.   hiyacar offered NHS staff free car hire on their platform during Aoril, May and June and are continuing to work to support staff with discounted access.  Read more here.    Karshare - is checking, cleaning and fully insuring vehicles for health professionals and the voluntary sector to use for FREE - as of 1st July a daily insurance charge has been added.  Read more here     Arnold Clark has made available over 500 hire vehicles free of charge to NHS and frontline emergency personnel, and provided access to over 120 nine-seater minibuses. They have also provided over £20,000 worth of parts to the emergency services and are donating over 20,000 disposable seat covers to care workers in local communities, as well as supplying all their available PPE including face masks and goggles to hospitals throughout the UK.  Read MORe here   and further updates here 

Ride share

  Liftshare put together a special team dedicated to supporting vital services such as the NHS. Read more here  

Bike share

Some bike share schemes took the difficult decision with local authorities to close during the outbreak however where there was sufficient staff to manage the extra cleaning regime bikes were prioritised for key workers. All schemes are re-opened now with extra cleaning being carried out.   Transport for London's Santander Cycle Hire scheme offered free membership for NHS staff. Read more here.   Nextbike have a Covid-19 website they are keeping updated which shares their cleaning regimes and the free memberships they are providing to essential workers across their schemes. Read more here:    Freebike distributed bikes to Hospitals in London to use as free and safe transport until the end of July. They facilitated over 75,000 miles of free travel for NHS workers. Read more here.    Beryl Bikes made all of their bikes across the country free to use for NHS staff. They log in using a valid nhs email address. In London they have made bikes available for free long term personal hire for any Key worker by emailing at support@beryl.cc and Read more here.   Brompton Bike Hire crowdfunded to provider free folding bikes to NHS workers. Read more here and here.   Jumpbike offered free rides to NHS workers to help them get to and from work as quickly and safely as possible. Read more here.   BTNBikeshare, Brighton, offered free annual memberships for NHS staff in Brighton & Hove. There is a dedicated bike cleaning team, safety information on the website and information hubs, plus a number of virtual geofenced hubs to assist NHS staff journeys specifically.

 

On-Demand Bus Transport

  Zeelo offered safe bus transport service for critical workers including on board social distancing; deploying nationwide within 24 hours. The service has now been adopted by Ocado, Avara Foods, Argos, Matches, Colgate and Amazon with more to come (including hospitals).   Read more here  

Community Schemes

  South Ayrshire Community Transport offered their vehicles and driver to help in the community for food deliveries, and local cancer charities transporting patients under social distancing rules.  

Read Richard Dilks latest Local Transport Today article.

LIFE AFTER COVID-19

Read Richard Dilks latest Local Transport Today article.

Forty Shades of Rural

CoMoUK is saddened by the news of Share Now's withdrawal from a number of global cities including London. London does have a relatively complicated structure for car clubs, yet it remains very much open for business for shared mobility - with now nearly half a million car club members in the city. With measures such as the planned expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone in the future, there are strong further opportunities for car clubs to help more Londoners not own cars, drive less and use public transport and active travel more. Share Now customers will be contacted and given CoMoUK's details so they can be made aware of other providers in the market and hopefully continue their use of car sharing.  

READ MORE HERE

It is almost a month since the launch of the Commission on Travel Demand’s report on Shared Mobility: where now? Where next? This blog is an opportunity to take stock and ask not just where next but how to get there. The report painted a very clear picture about the carbon, congestion, inclusion, investment and indeed health benefits of greater sharing. Whilst it brought together data from across government, academia and industry, these statements on the positive benefits of sharing are not new. What was different was their placement against the demands of a Net Zero carbon future. Greater sharing is a technologically, socially and financially credible approach to rapidly decarbonising, alongside electrification. So, why is it still at the margins of policy and what needs to change for shared mobility to be at the forefront rather than the margins? First, there needs to be a recognition that nowhere in the UK has a credible transport strategy which is consistent with Net Zero. Not just the end goal of Net Zero but the carbon reduction pathway necessary every year en-route. Research by colleagues shows that even a Norway style take up of EVs does not get us close to our targets and that a MAJOR shift in how we travel has to be part of any pathway that gets us anyway close. I fear we will be waiting a year or two for the numbers to be run in local and national governments to show that there is no deliverable ‘electrification only’ strategy. We can’t rely on nudge either, the scale of behavioural change is not a nudge but something more fundamental. So, policy honesty is a necessary pre-condition to opening up the need for a substantially more ambitious shared mobility future. Second, the transport profession needs to do more to place the car in a mobility ecosystem. We should all advocate as strongly as we can for low carbon mass-transit, walk and cycle options. However, if we ignore the different challenges and needs or peri-urban and rural areas then we simply will not be providing a system which works for everyone. Shared cars, delivered through a range of business models, need to be part of the solution to decarbonise quickly. Without the work of CoMoUK and its predecessor organisations the evidence cupboard would be pretty bare. As such, the report recommends that the Department for Transport works directly with CoMoUK to develop a neutral repository for data and evaluation of new innovations such that there is a robust and trusted evidence base from which to justify policy change. The Commission made twenty recommendations to different national government departments, local government and industry players. They include ensuring that the potential for shared mobility to deliver carbon savings is given due consideration by the Committee on Climate Change and rethinking how research on sharing is done and how demonstrations and trials are funded, again areas which I would expect CoMoUK and member organisations to lead on. However, the recommendations are also action oriented as well as process focussed. In particular we identify a major opportunity with public fleets and procurement and for a change in approach by Highways England which currently focuses on vehicles per hour rather than people per hour. A rapid shift to supporting a motorway network which facilitates sharing and integration into local transport networks could be brought about if it is taken to be important. Twenty recommendations seems a lot and I would be surprised if they all prove to be implementable. Nonetheless, they represent a serious attempt to take an integrated overview of what needs to change to increase the amount of sharing from today’s levels. I’m looking forward to discussions at the CoMoUK Collaborative Mobility Conference in Birmingham in November to continue to push this ambitious, inclusive and low carbon agenda forward.
About the author: Greg Marsden is a Professor of Transport Governance at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. He is Co-Chair of the Commission on Travel Demand which is funded by the Centre for Energy Demand Reduction Solutions and UKRI. He also leads the DecarboN8 network which takes a place-based approach to accelerating decarbonisation across the North.