Public Funding for David Smith Consulting Limited

"Commute2NetZero" (C2NZ) will revolutionise scope 3 category 7 (commute and telecommuting) emissions reduction strategies for East Lothian Council and employers in East Lothian. C2NZ will enhance the existing data-driven digital service, "CalCommuter," (developed to MVP in Innovate UK FastStart project) which already works out the cost, emissions and duration of current and potential commutes for individual employees allowing employers to benchmark, and then provide personalised incentives for commute emission reduction. Before piloting with at least three large employers in East Lothian (East Lothian Council, Queen Margaret University, and Charles River Laboratories and others participating in the Workforce Mobility project), the Commute2NetZero project will enhance the CalCommuter MVP in three key ways: Firstly, working with East Lothian Council's Sustainability and Climate-Change team to accurately capture telecommuting patterns and emissions for each employee, enabling the calculation of their heat and energy emissions associated with telecommuting. Secondly, the team will develop an automated data visualisation dashboard for commute and telecommuting emissions data, providing comprehensive insights for employers and facilitating the targeting of NetZero commuting and heat/energy reduction incentives to specific employees based on their CalCommuter results. Lastly, it will open up commute and telecommute data for use by East Lothian Council and other public bodies and researchers, supporting the design of better NetZero policies and sustainable travel initiatives. Opening up data will enable collaborative understanding and working between stakeholders to develop creative and impactful interventions and monitor their impacts and outcomes. Our solution goes beyond traditional commute planning tools by incorporating telecommuting emissions analysis, which is particularly relevant in the post-COVID remote work landscape. The innovation lies in features such as personalised cost calculations for employee commutes, automated visualisation of commute and telecommute data, and personalised emission reduction interventions. This holistic approach allows employers to identify emission hotspots, prioritise interventions in line with NetZero policy objectives, and target specific NetZero initiatives based on each employee's actual commute and teleworking options. By promoting initiatives tailored to employee needs, such as cycle-to-work schemes for those with a valid cycle commute option, workplace parking and work from home policies for those without sustainable commute options, or air- and ground-source heat pump grants for those in target areas, we can drive meaningful emission reductions across specific workplaces. Our project supports the goals of East Lothian Council's Climate Change Strategy, the Active Travel Improvement Plan, and the Local Transport Strategy, and addresses the evolving landscape of remote work.

Personal Travel Planning is a very manual and often expensive process which doesn't currently provide valuable personalisation to individual commuters. There are some transport providers in the market who offer cost calculators for their commuter focused products, but these calculators are either only for their own transport service/tickets, or act primarily as a sales pipeline for their own transport solutions. This project aims to determine the technical and commercial feasibility of the "CalCommuter" and produce an automated prototype of the tool. The CalCommuter will objectively work out the personalised monetary cost, environmental impact and convenience of all commuting options for each employee, using an automated, Mobility as a Service (MaaS) based system -- from flexible and annual season passes for public transport, to cycling, to car sharing, to private car commute and more - for each employee in an organisation. After collecting information on all employee commute requirements and their current commute, the CalCommuter determines all options available for each employee. Importantly, before options are presented back to employees, their organisation can choose to subsidise or introduce new commuting options (such as a cycle to work schemes, park and stride, works bus, subsidised season tickets etc) to align with their environmental and other policy objectives. This way, an organisation not only gets a full picture of their commuting scope 3 emissions, but has the opportunity to remove barriers and nudge behaviour, through incentives, towards commuting habits which benefit: the organisation's objectives; their employees desire for a cost effective and convenient commute; local air quality; and the planet's climate crisis. The key challenge in this project is developing a technological solution that can automatically work out the cost, environmental impact and convenience of multiple travel options on an annual basis, instead of on a trip by trip basis without the need for without the need for expensive manual intervention each time. With increasing pressure from customers, shareholders and other stakeholders for organisations to reduce their direct emissions and their scope 3 emissions, the increasing cost of car ownership (not least of which increasing fuel costs), the gradual post-covid return to the office, the introduction of new transport modes and flexible season tickets, plus new legislation trends for Workplace parking levy and Low Emission Zones, there is a ripe opportunity to develop the CalCommuter as a simple to use tool that creates meaningful emissions reductions at an organisation wide scale.