What do you consider to be the most innovative aspects of your offer?
– One service that combines both private and public travel modes in a city into a single subscription
– Promoting multimodal access to mobility instead of ownership of individual modes of transport
– Public transit as the backbone of service to make cities sustainable, instead of competing with it
What are the most important impacts of your service in terms of sustainability?
Our dream is a world where you don’t need to own a car to lead a happy and hassle-free life. We want to create the best solutions for sustainable freedom of mobility.
We believe people and societies need mobility, as it brings so much good to our lives. But we also believe there has to be a more sustainable alternative to the current main choice of personal transport – the private car – that delivers at least an equal sense of freedom. We work toward enabling cities to make car usage restrictions obsolete by offering a more desirable alternative. For this reason, Whim exists.
Which aspects are particularly interesting from a design perspective?
Design of Whim started from a holistic perspective at the level of urban settlements. Cities are facing a crisis. The arrival of the automobile rapidly changed the way we moved, lived, and interacted. An average car sits unused 96 percent of the day, often occupying precious urban land. More young adults think that owning a car is a waste of time and money.
Whim is designed be a compelling alternative to car ownership. Our user research showed that mobility needs are highly contextual and change from moment to moment. A single mode, such as a car, is a very inefficient way of satisfying diverse user needs. Our design process involves regular interviews, co-creation sessions, and service design workshops with Helsinki region residents. We also observe and interview city residents in various transport hubs to understand their goals and challenges related to mobility. We started by testing design prototypes with smaller user groups in real city usage for almost a year and iterated based on the findings. We also developed design tools and methods to improve our insights.
Mobility-as-a-service can shift the transport modal split towards more sustainable, shared, and active modes. By doing so, we will be able to repurpose land currently dedicated to car parking and multi-lane roads, reduce congestion, and make cities cleaner. At a societal level, Mobility-as-a-service will make our cities fairer and more equitable by bringing sustainable, affordable and inclusive mobility to more of its in habitants.
Do you also offer your service digitally?
Whim is a digital service that is accessible through a smartphone app. It is available both in Apple App Store and Google Play store. More information is available from www.whimapp.com
What are some interesting numbers about the project?
Autumn 2020.:
Number of rides:
Customers have made more than 16 million trips using Whim since its launch in November 2017.
CO2 footprint:
As the world’s first Mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) operator, we have calculated our full CO2 footprint. The calculations were done according to the GHG Protocol and with an external partner, Positive Impact.
Total CO2 emissions of MaaS Global Ltd in 2019 were 2,9 t CO2e. This includes emissions from the company’s own operations and app development, Whim app’s servers and rides done by the app users.
We aren’t yet able to avoid CO2 emissions entirely. For this reason, we have offset our full carbon footprint for 2019 as the first MaaS operator. This includes our customer’s rides as well as what it takes to produce Whim.
Other stats:
Whim users have done city bike rides the equivalent distance to 5x around the world and saved 20 tons of CO2 in the process.
New mobility options can replace up to 38% of daily trips.
42% of Whim users combined citybikes trips with public transportation.
Whim users combine taxi 3 times more often with public transport compared to other users in Helsinki on average
What happens next? What are your goals?
Our goal is to replace 1 million private cars worldwide with Whim subscriptions by 2030.
