Gatwick Airport launches incentivised ride-sharing scheme for staff

Gatwick Airport has launched an incentivised ride-sharing scheme for staff, allowing employees to track the emissions they reduce by carpooling and rewarding those who share journeys most often.


The airport has partnered with journey sharing platform Faxi to launch the behaviour change scheme, which sees employees rewarded with preferential parking places if they manage to achieve reductions in vehicle miles and emissions by carpooling. 

During the programme, Faxi will collect data from each shared journey via a smartphone app and, over time, drivers who regularly transport the most passengers to and from work will be given the opportunity to upgrade to a staff car park of their choice – some of which are up to one mile closer to the terminal buildings.

The app will also allow staff to see the emissions and mile savings they are making in real-time and provide drivers with information on how far they would have to divert from their normal route to pick up colleagues. Gatwick claims this information will enable drivers to pick up as many passengers as possible while minimising the environmental impact of each journey.

Gatwick Airport’s head of car parking, Gary Wallace, said the scheme “demonstrates Gatwick’s commitment to being the UK’s most environmentally friendly airport” by enabling staff to reduce their car emissions, save on commuting costs and actively remove traffic from local roads.

Gatwick has a pledge in place to ensure that 40% of all journeys made by its passengers and staff is via public transport by the time the airport is serving 40 million passengers annually.

The scheme launch 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.

Low-carbon mobility

Gatwick has taken a host of moves to champion sustainable mobility in recent times, following its pledge to halve its carbon emissions by 2020, against a 2015 baseline.

The airport now hosts eight free charging points for electric vehicles (EV) in its short-stay car parks and offers up to four hours of free parking to drivers who use an EV to travel to and from the facility.

More recently, Gatwick launched a partnership with car-sharing firm Bluecity, which has seen 100 fully electric cars made available to passengers travelling to and from the airport.

The sharing economy was listed as one of the 10 game-changing developments that are empowering businesses to transition to low-carbon fleets in a recent edie Insight report. You can download the Accelerating the Shift report for free here.

Sarah George

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