Over the past few months, Leuven has been able to expand eHUBS in Leuven, including 9 electric shared cars. Meanwhile, 24 electric cars are already available in Leuven’s eHUBS. 2 of them were placed in the summer as part of a tender to try out these shared EVs in a mixed-user approach: the vehicles are exclusively available to city services during office hours and to citizens outside office hours.
The threshold for electric driving appears to be gradually decreasing among users. To this end, we also organised a demo session together with Cambio in early October, to which users enthusiastically subscribed.
Leuven discontinued the supply of Urbee's e-bikes at the end of June, as envisaged in the project and managed to increase the number of shared e-cargo bikes to 31 in consultation with Cargoroo. The city has moved its eHUBS parklet to a new location, Kesseldal, where it will evaluate the test-hub, with one e-cargo bike and 2 shared cars in the next few months.
In July, the city gained interesting insights from a satisfaction survey of Urbee and Cargoroo users. As the city of Leuven has already decided to consolidate the supply of shared e-cargo bikes after eHUBS, three conclusions from this survey are already interesting:
- 3/4 of respondents have 100% confidence in the Cargoroo sharing system.
- 36% of respondents assured car trips are replaced by e-cargo bike trips.
- The current respondents are mostly rather sporadic users (a few times/year). Nevertheless, 20% use the e-cargo bikes more than once a month. More than 60% of the respondents indicate that they are inclined to use them one or more times per month in the future.
At the end of September, Duwtje, a Dutch agency specialising in behavioural research and nudging, explained the final nudging plan for the city of Leuven. Based on a pilot campaign, literature and extensive consultation, the city of Leuven received interesting recommendations on how to increase the use of eHUBS and shared-mobility solutions. Also, in collaboration with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS), we gained additional insights on the barriers and motivations of car owners to continue using eHUBS.
