Paul Minett of Trip Convergence Ltd spoke to the Club on his innovative scheme to solve Auckland’s traffic congestion problems without building infrastructure, and without congestion pricing. In a nutshell his system is called 'reverse tolls' where people are paid to travel as passengers in preference to driving their own car. He said it's not only an Auckland let alone a New Zealand problem but a global challenge. Paul said that it's not in our habit of travelling as passengers so providing this service, the travelling passenger needs to be incentivised. Paul talked about the current situation of expanding populations and subsequent traffic congestion and considered options such as widening roads, increasing public transport, introducing a toll or the most favoured, incentivise shared trips.
The notion of incentivised shared trips is to reward people who change rather than charge people who do not change; that is buy decongestion rather than sell it. Drivers would be paid to travel as passengers especially in carpooling because they are providing a service. So the up side to this is that people can still drive if they want to, no need to expand the roading infrastructure and the big one reduce the amount of delay each day. People will need to be paid at a level that gets enough people to switch in order to get rid of the traffic congestion. This 'reverse tolls' would reward people who change mode and time of their trip. Paul's particular idea is to develop an app to track 'passengership' and provide instant cash rewards for the travelling passenger(s).
For a variety of reasons, Paul said it's difficult to find support to this idea and is seeking new people interested and helping to generate "some buzz". If you require any further information or wish to chat to Paul about how to move this forward he can be contacted on 021 289 8444 or email paulminett@gmail.com