Car­pool­ing to Events

CoReorient’s Kimppakyydit.com ser­vice test­ing at the NUTS Karhunkier­ros event and the Haa­pavesi Folk Music Fes­ti­val

CoRe­ori­ent test­ed turn­ing the car­pool ser­vice they devel­oped into an appli­ca­tion that is suit­able for event trans­porta­tion. A lot of valauble data for the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment was gath­ered and one thing became very clear: ease of use is the most impor­tant aspect, even with ser­vices that you make sus­tain­able choic­es with.

Inno­va­tion Tri­al

CoReorient’s Kimppakyydit.com car­pool­ing ser­vice is designed for rou­tine car­pool­ing for com­mut­ing for exam­ple. The goal of the inno­va­tion tri­al was to ease trans­porta­tion to fes­ti­vals with car­pool­ing or ease trans­porta­tion from one place to anoth­er dur­ing an event.

A ver­sion of the Kimppakyydit.com ser­vice was made that made it more suit­able for fes­ti­val use. Pre­sen­ta­tion mate­r­i­al was also pre­pared at the events and online and the events pro­mot­ed the ser­vice on their chan­nels.

Car­pool­ing is arranged on the appli­ca­tion in groups into which the users reg­is­ter for based on their trans­porta­tion needs. In the NUTS event, peo­ple could search for car­pool­ing to the run start­ing points and to the cen­tral meet­ing places. In the Haa­pavesi Folk Music Fes­ti­val the trans­porta­tion focused on Haa­pavesi, which is dif­fi­cult to reach with pub­lic trans­porta­tion.

Results

48 users reg­is­tered for the appli­ca­tion dur­ing the tri­al but dur­ing the NUTS event, mul­ti­ple tar­gets for devel­op­ment arose that pre­vent­ed the trips from being arranged. The ser­vice was devel­oped fur­ther dur­ing the tri­al for the Haa­pavesi Folk Music Fes­ti­val event. Even though infor­ma­tion about the ser­vice was shared to the fes­ti­val atten­dees, half of the users start­ed look­ing for car­pools only on the event week or only a cou­ple days before.

After the events, NUTS Karhunkier­ros and Haa­pavesi Folk Music Fes­ti­val includ­ed ques­tions about the car­pool tri­al in their attendee sur­veys, and CoRe­ori­ent asked for feed­back from the reg­is­tered users as well. Accord­ing to the NUTS feed­back, the ser­vice should be eas­i­er to use: demand­ing spe­cif­ic trans­port infor­ma­tion and the car­pool agree­ment process that, for exam­ple, empha­sizes safe­ty made the use of the ser­vice dif­fcult. One response was giv­en to the Haa­pavesi Folk Music Fes­ti­val sur­vey that described the ser­vice as func­tion­al and that they would hap­pi­ly use the ser­vice again.

Dur­ing the tri­al, many tar­gets of improve­ment were found for the appli­ca­tion to ease the use of the car­pool­ing ser­vice for events. For exam­ple, if the fes­ti­val or the route is known to every­body and the ser­vice is only used for find­ing car­pool­ing com­pan­ions, there is no need for a spe­cif­ic map. On the oth­er hand, trips to events or oth­er cities must have a dif­fer­ent use path.

Briefly

• The tri­al was orga­nized by CoRe­ori­ent.
• The events were NUTS Karhunkier­ros on May 27–28, 2022 ja Haa­pavesi Folk Music Fes­ti­val from June 30 to July 2, 2022.
• The goal of the tri­al was to enable the use of car­pool­ing in events and dur­ing them with the use of an appli­ca­tion and also to fig­ure out how oth­er use of the ser­vice would not cause con­fu­sion in event use.