Finishing the year strong: Ubiq is now in Prague

Making shared mobility profitable - one city at a time

PRAGUE: In light of an ongoing highly successful collaboration in Budapest, GreenGo and Ubiq are set to conquer the Czech capital together. The common mission is to turn this beautiful city into a less congested, green and sustainable one. And with another important city under the belt, this mission will not only be a successful one, but also a really fun and exciting one.

Unlocking the power of the crowd

With a strong reputation and fair pricing, GreenGo has quickly established itself as the leading car share operator in Budapest. And with its fleet of 45 cars increasing to 300 in just over 2 years, their electric cars known as ‘GreenGos’, are a common sight on Budapest’s busy streets. Prague is starting off a bit stronger, with a number of around 190 vehicles.

Attracting customers therefore has never been a problem in Hungary and will most likely not be in Prague either. Making sure vehicles are where they need to be to meet demand, however, can be a challenge. This is where Ubiq comes in.

A very common problem that shared mobility faces on its path to meet demand is an efficient utilization and management of the fleet. GreenGo identified this issue and teamed up with Ubiq into making sure that vehicles are in the right place at the right time, in order to meet demand.

Ubiq’s AI-driven rebalancing engine scans GreenGo’s fleet in realtime to see which vehicles are eligible for repositioning, providing an optimal new location for each car. An alert is then sent via the StreetCrowd app to StreetCrowd members - ordinary citizens paid and managed by Ubiq - who then execute the repositioning. Users simply sign up to Ubiq’s StreetCrowd app and can do as little or as many vehicle moves as they like.

Map of GreenGo fleet coverage in Prague

Demand is forecasted based on historical fleet data combined with other proxy data sources such as weather and local events. Fleet behavior is also ongoingly monitored to optimize the algorithms. With the city broken down into different zones, Ubiq predicts which parts of the city are likely to have high demand for GreenGo cars at any given time. GreenGo’s cars are then picked up by StreetCrowd members who move the vehicles from low demand (cold zones) to high demand (hot zones) areas.

A recipe for success

In combining a consumer-centric approach to car sharing with data-driven operational tools, GreenGo and Ubiq come together to provide better mobility services.

Since GreenGo and Ubiq launched such a partnership in Budapest last year, daily car rentals have increased by 40 percent. Moreover, the StreetCrowd community is a thriving one. With demand so high, in the beginning, Ubiq has had to install a waiting list for StreetCrowd members with more than 600 already registered. And as the majority of StreetCrowd members are often car share users themselves, GreenGo benefits from having an operational ecosystem of individuals invested in its service. This leads not only to increased revenues, but increased customer loyalty, too.

When it comes to the users themselves, interesting case studies have shown the unique benefits of why people choose to be part of the StreetCrowd community. One user in Germany, a bus driver, was spending time and money to get himself home from the bus depot at the end of his shift. So he became a StreetCrowd user and now, not only does he have transportation, but he’s also making money instead of spending it. And this is just one of their many inspirational stories.

StreetCrowd lets you make money every minute of the day except sleeping time and StreetCrowd support is there whenever you need and helps a lot! I am more than thankful to StreetCrowd for creating such an initiative to earn an extra income in these hard times. I am only sad that I found StreetCrowd very late.

Mert - StreetCrowd user

As the collaboration between Ubiq and GreenGo has already shown significant results, we all start the journey in a new city with a lot of excitement and confidence. Šimon Čapek, GreenGo’s Chief Executive Officer in Prague is certain that shared mobility makes more sense economically in a crowded city and is ready to push forward:

"When you drive less than ten thousand kilometers a year, shared mobility is much cheaper, i.e. more economical"

Šimon Čapek for the CzechCrunch podcast

Šimon also confidently states that - with Ubiq’s support - operations and processes will improve more and more:

"It is already standard that our customers have an average of five minutes' walk from GreenGo cars from anywhere in our service zone; and I'm certain that time will shorten now."

We’re happy to have such strong partners in our journey of transforming cities, making them cleaner and less congested. And we’re even happier to now do it also in Prague.

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Ubiq enables operators to effectively position fleets to serve strategic goals. For more information, contact sales@ubiq.ai