Credit: MDDI
Today marked the launch of the new Luxembourg carpooling platform “CoPilote”.
The new website and mobile application (Android and iOS) for carpooling, presented on 8 May 2018 by Minister of Sustainable Development and Infrastructure François Bausch and Secretary of State for Sustainable Development and Infrastructure Camille Gira, connects people with similar journeys so that they can share their journey in a single vehicle.
In 2017, the Luxmobil survey showed that for home-to-work journeys the overall rate was only 1.2 people per car, meaning that there are 250,000 empty seats in cars entering Luxembourg City every day. This situation creates very large and one-way traffic flows, leading to saturation of all transport networks at peak times. This characteristic also means that many people share their workplace destination. Moreover, the localities in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and its three neighbouring countries often have a rather small number of inhabitants (under 1,000) which makes an efficient service by public transport complicated. These findings led to the conclusion that carpooling would make a fairly simple, economical and effective option to limit congestion as well as greenhouse gas emissions by reducing the number of cars on the move.
As a result, the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Infrastructure (MDDI) has set up a tool to facilitate the connection between drivers and passengers: the carpooling platform "CoPilote".
The CoPilote website and app requires free registration to benefit from the platform’s full functionality- although users may do an initial journey search without registering- where drivers enter their regular and/or one-off journeys. Drivers can then, if they so wish, enter additional information such as radio listened to or what size of luggage passengers can carry. Once the trip is published it can be found by a simple search by all potential passengers who can book the trip in a similar way to online shopping platforms. The driver has the right to claim a contribution to the travel expenses of his car, which can range from 0 to a maximum of 10 cents per kilometre and passengers pay via the platform. To make the service even easier and more enjoyable, passengers and drivers will have the opportunity to follow their drivers or their passengers on a map to better understand the exact time and place of the meeting.
To encourage the public to use CoPilote, the platform will reimburse passengers up to a maximum of €2 per trip during the launch phase (until 15 July 2018). To further encourage this in the future, the MDDI is currently studying the creation of infrastructure dedicated carpooling, including lanes on the motorway reserved for vehicles with at least 3 passengers.
