IN COLLABORATION WITH ENDESA
Making our cities more sustainable involves reducing the human impact on roads. Not only with electric vehicles, but also adopting changes in our routine related to the efficiency with which we move. The combination of micromobility with public transport is the basis of Meep, a Spanish project that operates in many provinces throughout the country and has achieved great international support from its users.
Guillermo Campoamor, co-founder and CEO, says that the first development work on this application was carried out in Madrid, but its initial client was the EMT of Malaga. Together with two friends they created this company and in just over five years of open history, Meep has offices in Philadelphia, has remote workers in different parts of the world and has achieved such success that citizens from multiple locations can enjoy its services.
Guillermo is the third protagonist of eVisionarios, a project in collaboration with Endesa that aims to make visible profiles that have opted for innovation, the development of electrical initiatives and entrepreneurship with the aim of making our environment better and more sustainable. And, in the same way as Endesa, based on electric mobility to make life in cities easier.
“I have traveled through many countries, I have been to many cities and what I realized is that the majority need to be a little more humane with their inhabitants and with tourists,” says Campoamor. Under this premise, the CEO begins to build his project with the intention that “people move more sustainably through the city and are not stuck in traffic for so long.”
“Most cities need to be a little more humane with their inhabitants and with tourists”
The dual function of the Meep service is to ensure that users waste less time on each route they take and have as little impact as possible on the environment. They make this a reality by connecting various modes of transport in a single channel, in which they can plan, reserve and pay for all the trips they make within the city.
multimodal trip
To achieve this efficiency from a sustainable point of view, Meep is based on the concept of micromobility. This is used “in light vehicles, normally with two wheels such as scooters and bicycles, and we believe that it is essential,” explains Guillermo Campoamor, but also combining it from its system with the public transport networks of the different cities so that “the people” can make a multimodal trip faster and more efficient.”
Meep’s technology, in this way, allows users to have a single application to manage all their movement around the city, in addition to being able to do without other applications to make registrations, payments or reservations. The ability to simplify all processes and connect all the necessary information is one of the great differentiating features of Meep.
“There are few applications that start from a more general and holistic point of view like we do. We accompany the user from the moment they plan a trip, we give them all the options and, once they have selected the alternative, we give them the ability to buy a bus ticket, part of the trip by taxi or scooter,” details the CEO of Miep. This union between journey planning and the acquisition of contracted transportation services “is not developed by many players in the market.”
More efficient cities
Slowly changing to a multimodal travel culture is one of the desires of the founders of Meep. In this way, it is possible to optimize time and be more efficient with the environment. In addition, tools like this application facilitate decongestion in cities by promoting the use of two-wheeled vehicles and public transportation.
The application has an emissions calculator when the user plans the trip.MEEP
“If there are fewer cars on the road, there will be fewer emissions. And the reduction of trips by private car, replacing them with more sustainable and shared transport,” says Campoamor, is another of Meep’s sustainability assets. The philosophy of making city mobility more sustainable by this Spanish startup is so clear that one of the variables in Meep’s journey planner is an emissions calculator.
“Since we were born, that has been our goal.” We have not known any other reality. Our project has always been what it is. These are the values of our product, which is very well received,” acknowledges the founder. This conception has led them to success in countries like Malta, always taking into account that the needs of each citizen depend on each specific environment.
Connected mobility
“Mobility is a very local issue and it is very difficult to apply the same solution to various cities with the same impact.” To achieve this, the local approach is key for users to trust their services: “We analyze the cities and the solutions we have. Our approach is to always provide a solution that helps solve local problems. The problems that a person who uses public transport in Malta has are not the same as those in other places. Therefore, we adapt locally and make small modifications to deploy in different places.”
“Our approach is to always provide a solution that helps solve local problems”
Precisely in Malta they are already the first most used public transport solution and have achieved up to almost 6% improvement in satisfaction with the use of public transport due to the reduction in waiting times. Thanks to concern for people’s difficulties, Meep has managed to carefully calibrate the solutions they offer to users. In this way, it is easier to make people “increasingly convinced of sustainability” and to trust connected mobility.