What if you combined the top 5 apps in (micro)mobility and made them green — Is this the best mobility app?

In this article, I will only be focusing on the first and last mile and micro mobility means of travel. I will start by giving my personal top 5 and will combine them to create the best app I can think of — an app to travel completely green.

So without further ado here is my top 5.

1. Whim app — all your journey’s on one app. Public Transport, Taxi, Tram, Bike, Scooter etc. Within the app, you can travel in 3 modes. Fastest, Cheapest and Greenest. The only downside is the app is only available in 3 cities so far. Helsinki, Antwerp and West Midlands area.

2. TransferHero — yes, I am in love with our solution, and naturally, it is on the top of my list as the Zagreb Airport Transfer of choice. But here are a few reasons why you should use it as well.

a) Greenest available vehicle — we find the greenest available taxi, shuttle and private ride companies that will be your ride provider.
b) We plant a tree — for every ride made through us
This allows you to travel completely green without compromising on price or convenience.

3. E-scooters (VOI, Lime, Bird) — a micro-mobility solution where you share an e-scooter using an app to travel short distances with convenience and speed. You are also having fun. They are a plug-and-play solution so the only thing you need to have is an app like VOI and a credit card assigned to your account.

4. Public Transport — what is truly the greenest mean of transport, and is electric the way to go? This really depends on how the city or country produces its electricity, but in most cases, public transport is consistent with — the greenest. If done and executed right, nothing should beat public transport.

5. Smart bike-share — Ofo and Mobike are the two brands that come to mind, while nowadays it seems most of the cities have their own versions of it. Bikes are green and convenient to use. The quality is sometimes a challenge even in EU countries, but Ofo and Mobike are examples of smart bike sharing done right.

Now let’s make the perfect app:

1. You take the convenience and simplicity of use of Whimapp. One of the coolest things Whimapp has is the ability to pay as you go. The downside, it is only available in three cities. In order for our perfect product to work, it has to be available everywhere. API connectivity and getting all stakeholders on board is the hardest thing to tackle, but if executed, would be a gamechanger. I even see Whimapp being the first on the market with quite a few cities on board as they already raised significant funding and have the team and experience in place to make it happen
2. TransferHero will add the environmental sustainability part. We have developed an API which we call TaaS (Tree as a Service) which adds a tree to every ride, service or product bought. We also signed up transport companies that are able to offer the greenest available means of transport.
3. Next — add on top the micro-mobility (e-scooters, bikes etc) solutions. Getting from point A to point B significantly changes if you have all the players available. So from the train station to your meeting and from your meeting to the office with either ride-hailing, e-scooters, based on real-time traffic data.
4. Add public transport — that is a challenge in itself. In some cases, a credit card (or even better a virtual credit card) would be enough, but reality is you’d have to sign contracts with the relevant stakeholders to make it happen, and as you can imagine — that is the longest process.
5. Seamless payment. Pay as you go model or a daily trip model. For corporate travel, you would be able to also get all the invoices from one place and create a travel order that would require almost no admin.

To sum up:

The tech is there. The opportunity — immense. The need — very much there.
So why aren’t we moving faster towards this? Good question.