Liftshare to deliver one billion saved car miles by 2020

Liftshare customers are set to save the UK 50

The company has already racked up 776 million saved miles – or 572,082 round trips from Land’s End to John O’Groats – and founder Ali Clabburn has claimed the target is “entirely achievable”. Founded 21 years ago, Liftshare is now a £4.2m company and has 664,000 registered users.

As well as a platform for domestic passengers, it also operates Liftshare for Business, with 700 public and private sector clients, such as South Gloucester Council. The company promotes how financial savings can be made through reduced costs in space rental, car park management and maintenance. It also highlights how individual employee savings from car sharing can also be a useful tool in staff retention and recruitment.

It comes after research from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found that only 10% of people in the UK regularly share car journeys with another passenger, despite research from Ford and PwC suggesting that nearly half (48%) of motorists would be happy to share a ride with someone they know.

Also, the firm pointed out how car sharing assists with the reduction of air pollution, and the Government’s Clean Air Strategy includes a range of measures aimed at tackling transport-related emissions levels. It also supports local authorities in their efforts under the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) framework for England, published in 2017, to improve air quality and minimise the impact of these local plans on individuals and businesses.

In fact, 15% of Liftshare’s business customers fall within the stated CAZs and have already begun to work towards the CAZ framework by implementing Liftshare schemes to take vehicles off the road altogether.

Environmental benefits

Liftshare’s founder Ali Clabburn believes that the relevance of the business to today’s consumers has to be more about the positive environmental benefits of car-sharing alongside the financial issues.

In the light of the government’s Clean Air Strategy, 51,000 tonnes of CO2 will be saved by corporate Liftsharers in 2019 alone.

“Our mission is to solve the world’s mobility problems through sharing. We can achieve this by driving behavioural change, which has a tangible impact on emissions levels and can really make a difference,” Clabburn said.

“We completely understand that for many businesses and individuals, saving money is what makes car-share schemes attractive in the first instance, but our aim is to encourage more and more users to use it as a way to take responsibility for their own environmental impact. And we support that by operating as a social enterprise, ploughing our profits back into improving the services that we provide.”

Car share initiatives

Liftshare has taken on many initiatives over the past two decades to reduce car journeys and get near to the one billion mile mark. In 2015, it partnered with the Football League to encourage fans to travel to games as efficiently as possible.

The partners launched a ‘Get to the Game’ travel platform, where fans could post details of their match day travel and offer spare car seats to other fans for a split of the total petrol costs. It claimed the move could potentially save a million miles in fan journeys across the UK.


Liftshare at edie Live

Liftshare will be exhibiting at the UK’s largest sustainability and energy exhibition this year, edie Live on 21-22 May.

The two-day show – edie’s biggest event of the year – has become a highlight of the calendar for sustainability, energy and environment professionals looking for new ideas and solutions that will help them achieve a low-carbon, resource efficient and profitable future for their business.

Register for your free edie Live 2019 pass here.

James Evison

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