– By Caroline Falls –
One of the fantastic stories at the AFMA fleet Management Conference was the one told by GoGet general manager Justin Passaportis, about the car share company’s foundation and trajectory.
“What we’re offering here is an alternative to car ownership,” said Passaportis. “We know we need to have our vehicles as close as possible to where people live and work. Each share car takes 10 privately held vehicles off the road.”
Passaportis joined GoGet five years ago, from Hertz where he headed fleet operations for carshare. He’s overseen a trebling of GoGet’s fleet and growth of the membership to 35,000.
GoGet branched out into share ride bus service Keoride, a collaboration with Keolis Downer and Transport for NSW. Passaportis explained the on-demand bus service and car share services are expanding rapidly.
“The user experience is: you go to the app, request a trip, the app aggregates similar trips and a Keoride driver picks up and drops off people on similar routes.” It’s a first-mile, last-mile solution introduced in Sydney, NSW. “You can hail it from home, a point of interest, a bus stop,” said Passaportis.
Popularity of the service drove Keoride to upgrade the entire fleet of RAVs with people movers. “We needed to make the vehicle bigger,” said Passaportis. “We were inundated with demand.”
The Committee of Sydney awarded the Keoride as Best Industry-led partnership in Smart City awards.
The on-demand bus service operates in the Northern Beaches, North Ryde and Macquarie Park, and its takeoff has made NSW uptake of on-demand services one of the fastest growing in the world.
Meanwhile, it’s also screaming up the charts in Victoria. Max Wang, product manager at RACV, the state’s Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, shared the AFMA session titled Mobility Management — The Future and Now. RACV has launched a mobility as a service app arevo. Wang explained you can book and unlock cars by the app, it is booked by the hour. Fuel and insurance are included in the price, which is a subscription service. Arevo has a range of 50 vehicles, including hatchbacks, transit vans, and hybrids.
Wang’s vision is to create a platform that combines all relevant modes of transport in a way that enables seamless planning, booking, access and payment of journeys.
“Our goal is to help Victorians and make their lives better,” said Wang. He said some 90 percent of users of RACV’s bike share app are local. “This might suggest you drive to the station, take the train and then hire a bike to get to the office.” The blue bike fleet has some 600 bicycles.
He said the public launch of arevo resulted in 3,000 downloads of the app within a couple of days.
