Berlin launches one-stop mobility app to cut private-car use
BERLIN has launched a mobile application to make sure that shared rides – not privately owned cars – are the best way to get around the German capital, as it tries to reduce traffic and greenhouse gas emissions.
The city’s public transport operator, the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), developed Jelbi, an app that lets travellers book and pay for rides on its subways, trams and buses. The app also grants users access to 11 external offerings, including shared cars from Miles Mobility and Sixt, bicycles from Nextbike, as well as electric scooters from San Francisco-based Lime, Stockholm-based Voi and Germany’s Tier Mobility.
The BVG also set up some 80 physical mobility stations next to Berlin’s public transport terminals, so that users can easily switch transport modes.
Jakob Michael Heider, head of the company’s Jelbi unit, said: “We want to offer people an attractive one-stop shop for shared transportation so that they don’t need to own a car.” He added that the company is in talks to bolster the platform with offerings from Uber and Share Now, the car-sharing venture that Stellantis is buying from BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
I spoke with Heider about the challenges of overhauling transport in big cities, which not only involves convincing people to ditch their cars, but also more mundane issues such as dealing with an army of kick scooters clogging up pavements. Here are the highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Question: A public transport operator teaming with external mobility providers – and potentially cannibalising subway or bus rides – is a pretty bold move. How did that come about?
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Answer: We’d have to go back to 2018 for that, the year the idea for Jelbi was born. Back then, we at the BVG were confronted with a growing city and record car registrations. Berlin had even become Germany’s traffic jam capital. So we wanted to encourage the 3.7 million people in Berlin to switch to shared mobility – and by that I mean public transport as well as private-sharing offerings – and that way reduce traffic and emissions. One of the core aspects of implementing this strategy was making the use of shared mobility more convenient – in our case, with a one-stop platform as an attractive alternative to private cars. We couldn’t do that on our own. All of our partners have the same goal of getting people out of their cars into shared mobility, and that’s why we don’t see ourselves as competitors. Furthering the mobility revolution and making cities more liveable – that’s something we can achieve only together.
Q: Still, private mobility companies don’t always play nice with each other. Was it a challenge to onboard all these offerings and get them to open up?
A: We were actually overwhelmed by the positive response from sharing companies in Berlin. For the most part, they approached us to become part of Jelbi. For one, they wanted to position themselves clearly as partners of the city. After all, like other places around the world, Berlin also is increasingly regulating the shared mobility space. Secondly, public transport still is the clear leader of urban mobility, which means joining Jelbi gives our partners access to a very significant customer base. And thirdly, while we control the strategically important customer interface, we have a “shared customer” concept, meaning that any ride booked using the Jelbi app with one of our partners also creates a customer in their respective backends. So we all benefit.
Q: Growing usage surely is a challenge, given that so many platforms vie for travellers’ attention?
A: Since Jelbi went live in 2019, we’ve been growing steadily, also in terms of users. We’re at around 500,000 downloads and 220,000 user registrations. But to be honest, generating more awareness is a challenge. As a publicly owned company, we don’t have the marketing budget of Uber. At the same time, the sharing of offerings is still a niche product. That’s why I’m convinced you need a holistic approach of “pull” and “push” measures to overhaul urban mobility. We have partly covered the “pull” side with Jelbi, which now offers access to some 60,000 vehicles. But a city also needs a clear strategy for nudging people to make the switch, for example by making private-car ownership less attractive. Ultimately, it must no longer be the case that private-car use is privileged in cities, but that shared mobility is promoted. This means a paradigm shift – you redistribute public space and give it back to the people.
Q: Shared mobility isn’t without controversy. Some cities have banned kick scooters, for example, because they’re filling up pavements. How does Jelbi deal with those issues?
A: We already have some 80 mobility hubs – often with infrastructure like electric-car chargers – across the city. But now that there’s rising concern over safety due to micro-mobility, we’re going one step further. This year, we plan to set up 150 so-called Jelbi Points, which are small parking areas for rental bikes or scooters, at micro-mobility hot spots in Berlin. We have received a commission from Berlin for that, and it ties into the city’s goal to create a regulatory framework for micro-mobility. This means that in the future, companies will be obliged to have their two-wheelers parked at these Jelbi points, with a no-parking zone implemented within a radius of 100 m.
Q: You’re financed by Berlin to help overhaul mobility in the city. What about making money?
A: Our task with Jelbi indeed isn’t to generate more revenue for the BVG, but to help advance the mobility shift. Still, we’ve led the BVG into the strategically important platform business. Our intention, when we started, was to occupy this key marketplace in Berlin, and that will enable us to develop additional business models down the road.
Q: Such as?
A: We’re already being approached by lots of companies eager to provide their employees with seamless access to sustainable mobility, for example. They’re under increasing pressure to cut emissions and want to replace company cars. The idea is that companies can grant their workers a budget for mobility that they can then put to use within the Jelbi app. We’ve done a successful test run with the Bundesdruckerei, Germany’s federal printing company, and we expect more demand from that side of the business in the future. BLOOMBERG
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