Case studies - Government - South West Wales

SWWITCH regional consortia is one of four in Wales, made up of the four south-west Wales Councils, and covering all areas of transport and access. SWWITCH have a partnership with a wide range of stakeholders including the Welsh Assembly Government.

Jayne Cornelius is Travel Plan Coordinator, and from her very successful work with a large number of employers in implementing Travel Plans for their organisations, it became apparent that car-sharing was a very popular choice but that one of the biggest barriers was 'help finding a car-share partner'.

Several companies were approached to tender for a regional car-share scheme, with liftshare being one of them. After much consideration and deliberation, the unanimous choice of car-share scheme provider was liftshare. The website was built to SWWITCH's specifications, with images of their own choice featuring locally recognisable features. Welsh was added which in Wales is very important.

Since taking up the scheme, the success stories speak for themselves. Seven organisations run their own private groups, with many others just using the SWWITCH2Share scheme as it stands. Since the SWWITCH2Share website was set up, the other regions in Wales have gone on to set up car-share schemes. And due to the success of the SWWITCH2Share scheme, all of the other consortias chose to use liftshare for their schemes. In November 2009 Wales became - to our knowledge - the first country in Europe to have one, bi-lingual, government-funded car-share scheme to cover the whole country.

Commercial Manager, Louis Clabburn, has stayed in regular contact with Jayne since the launch of SWWITCH2Share. Jayne says:

“Louis has been extremely helpful and supportive throughout the whole process, from start-up to the present day,”

“He has run several marketing workshops in the area and has provided training to the SWWITCH Travel Plan Officer to help her promote SWWITCH2Share. He also helped a colleague with advice when she was doing a marketing qualification.

The team at liftshare are always on hand to support the scheme with advice and help on marketing, and using the excellent monitoring pages. The feedback I receive is always very positive about the scheme, with those that sign up as passengers finding it really useful when they have no alternative modes of transport.”

Jayne is confident that marketing the scheme also leads to a lot more informal car-sharing which would not otherwise have happened.

“Not all those who car-share actually register on SWWITCH2Share.com - however, as you promote the scheme, many people become more aware of the concept of sharing. I would say that, for every registered car-sharer you have, you have half a dozen informal ones who start car-sharing just because they have seen the marketing.”

From the start, we have put Jayne in touch with other car-share managers around the liftshare network, which she has found a real benefit - sharing ideas and best practice.

“It's been great to have this network of liftshare administrators to question on issues such as marketing materials which work and don't work - this saved us money in not wasting it on freebies which don't work.”