By Sweet Torres Guzman, Tennessee Lookout
July 24, 2020
Carpool’s Hytch Company and Middle Tennessee State University Data Science Institute (MTSU) have teamed up for an exam that appears to be Hytch Rewards can only be used as a contract tracking app and as a particularly traffic congestion form.
In 2018, Hytch, a social impact generation company in Midstate, hired MTSU to examine the Hytch Rewards app’s knowledge of how travelers used the service. The company sought to reduce traffic congestion and pollutants through car sharing, car sharing or public transport.
Dr. Charles H. Apigian, co-director of the Data Science Institute at MTSU, headed the study on how to give commuters incentive to reduce single-occupancy rides. Nissan initially sponsored testing by providing commuters with a five-cent-a-mile incentive. Apigian’s team then gradually decreased the monetary incentive in order to test to what degree commuters would continue to use the app. Apigian concluded that a two-cent-per-mile incentive was enough to keep sustained usage of the app. In other words, said Apigian, $3.54 a month per the average 14-mile trip is a small price to pay.
“If you were a company looking to catch your employees, $5,000 a month could catch 1,500 users at two cents according to the mile,” Apigian said.
While COVID-19 makes it difficult to share the car, Hytch has refocused its efforts by transitioning the application from an automotive sharing platform to a mobility platform.
“The missing link between painting sites and sites is how to get there. How do we intelligently track our mobility decisions?” said Mark Cleveland, Hytch’s chief executive.
When the app was first created to reduce the environmental impact on traffic, the pandemic gave Hytch the opportunity to rethink the idea. Cleveland claims that the mobility generation app can use location knowledge to track location and proximity. With Hytch Rewards, travelers can see how long they’ve been in a specific domain and will in rarely be reminded to continue social estrangement practices while being offered a social distance “score.” In theory, the app’s ability to gather knowledge about the proximity of travelers will make it less difficult to locate contacts.
“It’s just an opportunity for us to say, “Hey, one of the behaviors we need is physical estrangement and here’s a reminder to keep your space,” Cleveland said.
The question is, Cleveland said, whether other people are willing to share percentage knowledge to save the community.
Cleveland solves the problem by claiming that the knowledge gathered from travelers is encrypted.
Commuters Trust, in collaboration with Hytch, will offer a premium of 50 cents according to the mile and hopes to offer features in under-neglected areas. The director of the Commuters Trust, Aaron Steiner, reports that lately they are establishing partnerships that will allow them to provide transportation for the unemployed.
“COVID’s long-term recovery will have increasingly secure mobility options,” Steiner said.
With this data, Hytch hopes to inspire employers or local governments to inspire travelers to continue sharing the car.
Former Maryland governor and 2016 Deocratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley addressed the issue during a Thursday webinar with Cleveland and Apigian.
“There’s nothing Hytch does that tells other people that they’ll have to decide to behave this way for society, yet there’s some inventiveness in Hytch’s ability to elbow, reward, identify regulations that promote it is not unusually good,” Malley said. Array, which took steps to reduce greenhouse fuel emissions while governor.
Hytch Rewards offers the Carbon Zero Commuting app for free. The platform that tracks exhaust emissions and determines how many tons of carbon credits Hytch and its partners will buy for a carbon-free journey.
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