Mobility Matters Daily #83 - Making money from mobility, and useful gender equality tools
With some data showing why these tools are important
Making money in the brave world of new mobility is hard even if you are popular
Earlier this month, CityMapper launched a crowdfunder campaign to give it a much-needed cash injection. It hit £6.7 million inside 24 hours, which is insane for a travel app. But as this article in Wired shows, not all is rosy in the CityMapper universe, and generating a profit from one of the best travel apps on the market remains elusive.
CityMapper is an example of how the value of data doesn’t necessarily align with where money can be made. For transport planning, data on regular trips is the most valuable (and consequently can be sold on more easily), but as a source of income for trip planners and operators regular trips are less profitable. Irregular trips are more profitable, yet is less valuable as a transport planning source and data source generally. For CityMapper, it is in a quandry. It has a lot of data on irregular trips that is less valuable, but shifting to regular trips may not necessarily be more profitable.
Then again, aligning income and value from current transport infrastructure isn’t exactly easy either
This excellent report on the business models of motorways by UNECE shows that making aligning the value proposition of transport infrastructure to incomes sources is as hard in “old” mobility. But a particularly interesting finding from this research across Europe was how road users integrate the value of road infrastructure into their own value creation processes.
Simply, transport is a derived demand. Or transport planning 101. Thus monetising value experienced elsewhere and which is intrinsic to invidual users is extremely challenging. This poses a further challenge to road user charging (which is a demand management measure) as users are not paying for the value that they receive from using the road, but instead a charge to realise the value of other activities that are nothing to do with the road. This may partly explain why road user charging on its own continues to be unpopular.
Don’t know how to do gender equality? You now have the tools, so use them.
A big thank you to Molly Hoggard, Marie Godward, and Laura Brooks for not only pointing me to this great toolkit for gender equality in transport, but for putting it together! The Gender Equality Toolkit in Transport (GET-IT) doesn’t just do a great job in getting a lot of different tools for improving gender equality in one place, but it points out how they are relevant to each stage of the planning process. I particularly like the Gender Impact Assessments, that I may or may not use with a client soon.
If you are wondering why this is necessary, firstly have you been living under a rock for the last 20 years? In case you have, the European Institute for Gender Equality sets out why transport is not gender neutral better than I ever will. Or perhaps Molly’s, Marie’s, and Laura’s research says it even more clearly. A shocking 46% of professionals have never considered gender issues in their work, while 93% of people they spoke to said doing nothing about this issue is not useful. You now have the tools. So hop to it!
Stat of the day
If you wanted to see the difference between travel needs of men and women, the English National Travel Survey puts it starkly. Females make more trips than males, and make fewer commuting trips, but make more trips that escort others (particularly to education) and visiting family members. Yet so much of our planning is based on the commute.
Data Link: Google Sheet | National Travel Survey 2019