SoylentNews

gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports

Helsinki, the capital of Finland, has 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, Helsinki's 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 they'd 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 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 car's life is spent sitting idle proponents think Helsinki's system, if sufficiently successful and effective, could more or less eliminate the need for car ownership among the city's residents.

In 2012, Helsinki debuted a program that could serve as a prelude for mobility on demand, called "Kutsuplus." (Finnish for "call plus.") It's 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 they'd 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 wasn't 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.

Kutsuplus was also cited by Sonja Heikkila, a 24-year-old Helsinki transportation engineer whose master's thesis laid the blueprint for mobility on demand. And while Helsinki's current plan appears to be rolling out mobility on demand as a public utility, Heikkila ultimately envisions the service is an actual marketplace: multiple apps created by different private companies, all competing for who can do the best job of packaging and planning transportation for customers. To that end, her master's thesis recommends that the city government not only provide the service itself, but also compile and make public the data that other firms could use to create their own version of the app. Legislation and regulation would also need to be altered to facilitate the new service, and frameworks set up to encourage cooperation among stakeholders.