The city’s public transport operator has built a go-to platform for getting around.
(Bloomberg) — Berlin is working to make sure shared rides — and 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, BVG, has developed Jelbi, an app that gives travelers access to its subways, trams and buses as well as 11 external offerings including shared cars from Miles Mobility and Sixt, Nextbike’s bicycles and electric scooters from San Francisco-based Lime, Stockholm-based Voi and Germany’s Tier Mobility.
Based on software from Lithuanian startup Trafi, Jelbi allows registered users to book and pay for all the different rides within the app. The business also has set up some 80 physical mobility stations next to Berlin’s public transport terminals so users can easily switch from say, the subway to an electric moped.
“We want to offer people an attractive one-stop shop for shared transportation so that they don’t need to own a car,” said Jelbi’s head Jakob Michael Heider, adding that the company is in talks to bolster the platform with offerings from Uber and Share Now, the car-sharing venture 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 sidewalks. Here are highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity:
A public transport operator teaming with external mobility providers — and potentially cannibalizing subway or bus rides — is a pretty bold move. How did that come about?
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 livable — that’s something we can achieve only together.
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?
We were actually overwhelmed by the positive response from the 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 in the Jelbi app with one of our partners also creates a customer in their respective backend. So we all benefit.
Growing usage surely is a challenge given that so many platforms vie for travelers’ attention?
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 an Uber. At the same time, sharing offerings still are 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.
Shared mobility isn’t without controversy. Some cities have banned kick scooters, for example, because they’re filling up sidewalks. How does Jelbi deal with those issues?
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 park at these Jelbi points, with a no-parking zone implemented within a radius of 100 meters.
You’re financed by Berlin to help overhaul mobility in the city. What about making money?
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 for us, and that will enable us to develop additional business models down the road.
Such as?
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.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.