CHUMS (Changing Habits for Urban Mobility Solutions)
March 2014 - August 2016
Intelligent Energy Europe funded project.
CHUMS aims to change travel behaviour mind-sets from single occupancy driving towards sharing the journey-to-work and decreasing the 50% of commuters who currently drive alone. The approach focuses on better promotion/awareness raising of existing schemes and understanding commuter’s needs to personalise travel options (including carpooling) and offer effective carpooling incentives.
The CHUMS project will build on proven strategies to remove the non-technological market barriers to wider uptake of car-pooling for commuters. To achieve this goal, three key elements have been identified as crucial from experiences with carpooling across the world:
- promotion campaigns to raise awareness and ultimately ATTRACT users
- good knowledge of the transport needs of employees to successfully MATCH users
- incentives to ATTRACT and RETAIN users
The following three specific measures which address the above key elements form the basis of the CHUMS approach:
[1] Establish a ’carpooling’ week (based on success of Liftshare Week in the UK)
[2] Provide Personalised Travel Planning service
[3] Establish ‘Mobility Jackpot’ lottery competition and prize for car-poolers
Within CHUMS, these three specific measures are being introduced to 5 ‘champion’ cities: Craiova (RO), Edinburgh (UK), Leuven (B), Toulouse (F) and Perugia (IT). The impact of these three measures will be evaluated in detail at each site and the project is developing recommendations and guidance for transferring the proven methods to the rest of Europe.
The target is to demonstrate that the CHUMS combined package of measures can support the EU’s 2020 target for energy and climate change achieving a >12% reduction in energy use for the journey to work at targeted employment sites.