The idea sounds great: students who live in a place with few good public transport connections can now plan carpool rides via a special app. Free, and the driver is also paid 2 euros per passenger as a reward. The province has invested heavily in this. But the enthusiasm for the app is rapidly decreasing, so that the costs for the province are now much higher than the 2 euros per ride.
The app, called Nabogo, can be used since March 2022 in the municipalities of Bergen op Zoom, Woensdrecht, Roosendaal and Steenbergen. Many public transport connections have disappeared in those municipalities, Nabogo had to provide an alternative. The company itself also focuses on preventing traffic jams on the website and doing something good for the environment.
The app is not newly designed, the company behind it has been active since 2018 in Denmark and two other countries.
‘Tax-free subsidy’
In the first months after the launch, an average of 330 trips per month were booked via the app. In recent months, that number has fallen to just 109 rides, according to figures that Omroep Brabant requested from Nabogo. At Nabogo, a ride equals one passenger, so if there are several people in a car, it counts as several ‘rides’.
In ads Nabogo offers the car owner a 2 euro ‘tax-free subsidy’ per passenger. A simple calculation shows that you can earn as much as 240 euros per month by giving friends a lift. ‘Supported by the Province of North Brabant’, the advertisement reads.
77 euros per ride
The company does indeed receive money from the province. A total of 170,000 euros has been deposited for the experiment. With 2200 journeys on the counter at the beginning of May, this amounts to a contribution of 77 euros per carpooler taken along.
The project will run until November this year. If the enthusiasm for the app continues to decline at the same rate, at most a few hundred more journeys will be added, bringing the contribution of the province to slightly above 70 euros per journey. The question is whether it would be better to run a bus for that money.
‘It just costs money’
The province understands that the amount compared to the number of trips may be experienced as very expensive. But ‘innovation simply costs money’, according to a spokesman. Particularly in the phase in which something new is being tried out, such as now with the Nabogo app, it is not surprising, according to the province, that a lot of money is being spent.
The 170,000 euros for the carpool app comes from a jar intended for experiments in the field of shared mobility. Whether that money has been well spent will become apparent after the evaluation that is scheduled for the end of November.