Why we ran a cab service from our office in London to learn about the future of transport
The Zume project was a radical experiment in Cambridge that got commuters out of their cars and into public transport, without investing in any new infrastructure.
The most difficult part of building a huge, integrated transport system is knowing where and how to start. If the system depends on being seamless and slick, how can you understand customer behaviour in a prototype that is neither? A first step is understanding behaviour change.
In October 2016, Fluxx and Atkins ran an on-demand commuter shuttle service in Cambridge called Zume, as a way to understand how commuters would react to a Mobility as a Service product. This is an oral history explaining how the experiment came about and what we learned, told by the people involved.
Dean Wilson, Fluxx: “Genuinely, none of us knew what we were doing. We’d never done it before. But it was absolutely the right thing to do.”
Chris Mulligan, Atkins: “At Atkins we are trying to shape the future of transportation. So Mobility as a Service is a really interesting area of development for us. For us it’s about a completely new business model and about how we deliver services through a managed service platform.”
Michael Evans, Atkins: “When people have an understanding of what Mobility as a Service is, the immediate response is that it will be dominated by startups, organisations that are a lot more agile. I think the assumption is that this isn’t really a space that Atkins would play in.”
DW: “This experiment felt very pioneering. When we talk about Mobility as a Service, I don’t think anybody really knows what it will mean. It’s still just a concept. There is still a massive amount that needs to be sorted out to make MaaS anything like a reality, and that’s confusing and exciting all at the same time.”
Edward Hancock, Atkins: “Imagine someone leaving their house in the morning. Their phone connects directly and effortlessly to a transport-on-demand service. An automated car picks them up, takes them to a station. They walk straight onto the train; there’s no barriers or tickets. They’re taken straight to work. All the time they’re connected to wireless, they’re doing work and having conversations. This seamlessness is a million miles from what we experience today, but I think that there is an inevitability about it.”
CM: “Mobility as a Service as an idea is something that isn’t just a change for our client or a change for Atkins. It’s actually a change for the whole world.”
DW: “We set out by asking: What’s the least resource-intensive thing we could do to deliver an approximation of this bigger, more complex thing that we’d like to learn about?”
EH: “In trying to make this vision a reality, it’s important to find out what people want and to see if we can fit our skills and capabilities to that.”
CM: “We started out thinking, ‘What’s in this for a customer? What are the current issues that they are facing in their lives?’ We spent time interviewing customers and observing Park and Ride facilities and how people interact with those. Using that customer research really helped us understand the actual problems that everyday people face, and that knowledge helped us to determine what the service should look like in a way that would actually add value to it.”
“We realised early on that we had to find a foothold, something that would get us into the market. We needed a billing relationship with the customer, a brand and an app installed on their phone.”
Daniel Kirk, Fluxx: “One of the things we know from experience of testing new products and services is that there tends to be a difference between what people tell you about how they will behave, and how they actually behave. So we knew we had to set up a prototype and try it.
“Can we really get people out of their cars? That is going to be key to reducing the congestion in Cambridge. It’s what businesses, the city and ultimately the people of Cambridge need to happen in order for the city to carry on growing.”
CM: “Breaking into a new territory like Mobility as a Service is risky for us at Atkins. There’s a high chance of failure, but also quite a high chance of reward.”
DK: “We realised early on that we had to find a foothold, something that would get us into the market. We needed a billing relationship with the customer, a brand and an app installed on their phone. So we started a service called Zume, which was all about getting people from their homes to their work in a way that didn’t involve using a car.”
DW: “Zume simulated an on-demand bus service for people commuting into Cambridge from nearby towns like Royston. Buying a fleet of vehicles and hiring drivers wasn’t an option for our first experiment, so we partnered with a local cab firm, Panther, who provided the cars and an excellent team of drivers to help make things possible. We recruited ten participants who were willing to give up using their cars for the duration of the trial, which was three weeks.”
Janet, Zume Trialist: “Each morning there was a car waiting for me at the same pickup point. I’d let Zume know when I was leaving work in the afternoon so the car would be ready waiting at the Park and Ride.”
EH: “We knew from the start that there might not be any way to run Zume profitably. But we knew half the battle was in starting. Once you begin, you start to learn. You can pivot and look other ways to improve the system. There are just so many facets to transport that we can experiment with. We quickly learned that people are very attached to their cars!
They see their cars as affording a level of convenience that is really hard to match by any other means. Maintaining consistency of experience across different modes of transport is hard. It’s no good giving people 19 miles of a great journey if the last two miles are dreadful.”
Ryan, Zume Trialist: “I was pleasantly surprised by the buses into town. Much better than I expected.”
ME: “By experimenting in the way we did with Zume, by gaining first-hand insights, we really got to the heart of those customer pain points.”
DK: “We know a lot more about how difficult it is and exactly why it’s difficult to get people who are driving to and from work out of their cars, and that’s incredibly valuable for us.”
“Breaking into a new territory like Mobility as a Service is risky for us at Atkins. There’s a high chance of failure, but quite a high chance of reward.”
CM: “We’re looking at those big innovation areas that potentially deliver high returns but are higher risk than we’re used to. Working with Fluxx to run experiments helped us do things really quickly.”
ME: “It makes sense to do things in small steps and go on a journey with the customer.”
CM: “The Zume experiment helped us embrace a more creative approach. We spent a good deal of time opening up the problem from different perspectives.”
DK: “This is a difficult area to experiment in. Startups have gone bankrupt after spending a fortune buying vehicles and building infrastructure. Using our approach they would have learned that that wasn’t the right way to go before spending the money.”
EH: “I thought that Zume was a brilliant and ambitious idea.”
CM: “I would definitely do it again.”
If you’d like to see ways we’ve helped companies and could help yours, take a look at our site: Fluxx.uk.com, subscribe to our newsletter and/or read the free download of our new book What we get wrong about people.
Dean Wilson is a Managing Consultant at Fluxx, a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. To find out more about our work with Southern Water, M&G, Legal & General and Arup. Email Dean at dean.wilson@fluxx.uk.com
