Overview
The CHUMS project promotes car pooling by combining carpooling week, personalised travel plans and a mobility jackpot lottery into one behaviour change campaign. Each campaign element has been shown to produce significant behavioural changes in a wide range of places where they have been delivered: increasing car occupancy, reducing car numbers and significantly reducing energy use. The aim of the project is to apply a composite CHUMS behavioural change campaigns in 5 ‘champion’ sites that represent the scale of carpooling and the diversity of mobility mind-sets across Europe: Craiova (RO), Edinburgh (UK), Leuven (B), Toulouse (F) and Perugia (IT). All of the 5 ‘champion cities’ have existing car-pooling systems, at various stages of maturity, which serve ‘closed’ target groups such as work-places, large employers or universities. Once proven, the application will be equally valid for ‘open’ systems for citizens in general. The project has already developed a European carpooling ‘interest group’ with members from 19 member states and candidate countries; where further take-up of the CHUMS measures will be developed during the project. The CHUMS consortium includes mobility behaviour experts, city authorities and carpool operators.
Results
The expected results will be:
- 10% increase in average car occupancy for commuter journeys at target employers
- 11% increase in carpooling mode share
- 22% reduction in single occupancy car trips amongst the target groups
- 9.2% reduction in total car trips amongst the target groups
- 12% reduction in energy use
The above contributes to a 1992 toe/year primary energy savings and 5788 t CO2e/year reduction of greenhouse gas emissions during the project. Furthermore it is estimated that there will be a 20,035 toe cumulative primary energy savings and 58,206 t CO2e cumulative reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.