The Move Me team needed to know what types of transport were available in the village, especially if they were under-used. The designers provided tools including a personal travel pack to help Scremerston First School pupils work with their families to create a picture of how they travelled.
The pack included a questionnaire to get them thinking about what method of transport they used, what route they took, where else they would like to travel outside school time and what ideas they had for improving people’s journeys.
The responses gave the team some valuable insights:
- 43% of parents would possibly be willing to take other families’ children to school
- 57% of parents never take other families' children to school
- 72% of parents thought the school should encourage less use of the car for school journeys
- People were obviously willing to make changes and wanted to help develop solutions to help people travel more easily. They also helped identify a list of transport problems.
The village’s top concerns were:
- Infrequent bus services
- Confusing public transport timetables
- A limited school bus run
- Expensive taxis
- Getting more bums on existing seats
Residents had also helped the designers compile a list of all the transport options they knew about in the village. They then identified under-utilised vehicles, from cars with empty school run seats to unused community mini-buses or rarely-used bicycles. Then they started developing ideas.
Richard Telford from live|work says it’s important for any community to see results from the ideas it has generated. Prototyping was the obvious answer. ‘This is where taking a design approach adds value,’ said Telford. ‘If you were developing a product you’d build a basic model, put it in the hands of the people who were going to use it, see what bits didn’t feel or work as you expected them to and change the design accordingly. The same principle should be applied to designing services.’
Prototyping transport solutions
Scremerston helped sift out the ideas that were either unworkable or premature and in the process it empowered the community who would be using the service. By learning to assess what worked, what could be improved and what could be learned, they began to fine-tune their own ideas.
As the Move Me team worked in Scremerston, they realised getting a clear picture of the impact of different transport choices is vital to instigating a redesign of any current system. Visualising what happens when you offer a lift to someone rather than driving your own car in the same direction, or when you take the bus rather than drive, is important to inspire people to make changes.
The team created an interactive map that could be used beyond Scremerston to encourage other people to develop designs for their transport network.
The interactive map illustrates the potential environmental and financial savings people could achieve by sharing lifts with others or taking the bus.
‘At one level, Move Me was about ride-sharing, which is not such a new idea. But ride-sharing – in common with all schemes to share resources and time – is bedevilled by issues of trust and security: how do you ensure that the stranger sharing your commute to work is not a psychopath?’
John Thackara
Programme Director , Dott 07
The breakthrough, in Move Me, was the realisation that, when a sharing service is co-designed by the citizens who will use it, many of these trust and security issues can be resolved without major effort.
Researching other services
The team knew they didn’t have to start from scratch with all their ideas. They looked for inspiration from other organisations that take an unconventional approach to transport services. From Germany they found a successful car sharing scheme that operated long-distance lifts between cities like Berlin and Munich, and the co-design team was asked to think about what made the scheme work.
They were also inspired by the North Northumberland Women’s Network (NNWN) which proved how incentives such as reduced costs can help a voluntary service thrive. NNWN operates an exchange and trading scheme where skills, services and goods can be traded using its own currency. Perhaps Move Me Money could be a way towards shared transport systems in Scremerston?