Overview
There are several mobility projects which are attempting to bring about behavioural change of consumers/users of transport in order to improve its environmental consequences. However, one of the main problems with these projects is that it is hard to monitor, and therefore also hard to evaluate, their progress and results.
MOBI is building on the From5to4 project, which was a national project in the Netherlands where they tried to get employers and employees to use energy efficient and sustainable transport modes for their commutes as an alternative to less environmental friendly modes of transport. The way in which this goal was approached was through making an online game that allowed for competition between friends and awarded points to the different competitors according to how energy efficient and sustainable their used transport mode was. One of the great advantages of this kind of promotion of behavioural change was that it was possible to monitor the progress of the participants through the online game platform.
The main objective is to have employees make 20% less car trips during rush hour, during the week: 1 day a week smarter travelling!
Mobi also aims:
- to inform employees about the benefits of using sustainable transport modes for their commute and business trips;
- to encourage employees to use sustainable transport modes through the implementation of a smart mobility competition;
- to encourage local authorities, public transport providers and organisations providing electric vehicles to champion the benefits of sustainable travel and
- to make recommendations to policy makers about further actions to increase energy effiiciency in commuter travel.
The first important step was to make the Version 1.0 of the game suitable for implementation in Europe: amongst other things simplify the registration process, translations into partner languages, new graphic design, more user-friendly way to insert modes and milage, a mobile version (app), additional awards, a Mobi gadget store to enhance your personal coach, a new CO2 widget and additional polls, asked during the playing period to obtain more information about the players.
Parallel to this specification of the European game philosophy, rules and branding and recruitment of participating organisations by the partners had to be done. Then the next steps are setting up an evaluation framework, using the Max-Sumo approach as well as target group segmentation.
Let's play! The implementation of the game starts. Evaluation, recruitment and implementation continue in parallel throughout the project.
Results
- Increase in the number of employees using sustainable modes of transport for their commute and business travel trips by 20%.
- Evolving 23.400 players directly in the game, and reaching 100,000 employees through the lifetime of the campaign.
- The project aims at 684 tonnes CO2 primary energy savings over the first two years (191 k litre fuel) and 6570 tonnes CO2 reduction (1.83 mio litre fuel) of greenhouse gas emissions as a structural effect over the next 10 years.