Innovation: Kutsplus (Call Plus)

Finland

AAI Domains:

• Capacity and enabling environment (use of ICT)

• Participation in society (social connectedness)

Travel in the urban environment is an important issue for the operation of the economy, how easily people can connect with each other, public health and active ageing. Congested cities clogged up by private cars can have negative effects across all of these areas restricting economic activity and limiting people’s mobility.

The health risks of air pollution from cars and buses with diesel engines are substantial and becoming increasingly recognised as a contributor to premature deaths in densely populated urban environments. Even in cities with highly developed public transport systems they cannot meet people’s needs for speed at reasonable costs hence the rise of companies such as Uber offering low cost private transportation despite the opposition of cities and their licensed taxi drivers.

Helsinki with a population of over 600,000 people within the municipality boundaries and over 1.4 million in the greater urban area is a large city with, by Finnish standards, a dense level of population. In common with many European cities it faces a range of urban transport challenges to meet the needs of an ageing population and so in late 2012 the Helsinki transport authority developed an innovative pilot project, Kutsplus (Call Plus).

Kutsplus used a small fleet of mini-buses seating up to nine people that people could summon using a smart phone app that would then pick them up from one of the cities thousands of bus stops and take them to the bus stop nearest to their destination via the most efficient route determined by satellite navigation and the other places that passengers were travelling to. This had the advantages of being quicker than existing public transport routes and cheaper than taxis and so provided an attractive alternative to both existing users of public transport and car drivers. The smart phone app also provided information on alternative forms of public transport and using a taxi service complete with a telephone number for a cab company.

Booking and payment took place online via the smartphone app and in the first year some 4,500 people had registered to use the 10–15 Kutsplus mini buses that offered free wifi for passengers while they were on-board. In terms of costs, passengers paid only for the mileage that they used if nobody else had been on board so while it was more expensive than public transport it was usually a quarter to half the cost of a taxi. However, revenue from passengers met only about 20% of the costs of the system and Kutsplus relied on public subsidy of several million Euros to be sustained while operating on such a relatively small scale.

Although Kutsplus operated successfully it did not expand sufficiently to operate on a commercially viable scale which would have required hundreds of mini buses and tens of thousands of regular passengers. The public subsidy for the scheme ended in December 2015 but Kutsplus established the viability of the technology and that the system could work effectively.

In terms of active ageing, Kutsplus was used by people of all ages and it was considered to be particularly beneficial for children who could travel unaccompanied and safely and for older people who could travel about the city at a lower cost than taxi fares and more quickly than using public transport. Kutsplus was based on the truly innovative use of ICT that enabled the system to operate and while it has withered in Helsinki it may return in 2017 and now that it has proven that it can work it may only be a matter of time until another municipality adopts the concept.

Websites

Wired

Bloomberg