Metlink’s Journey Cost Calculator: Save & Reduce CO2

"Understanding the full cost of a journey plays a big part in influencing peoples’ daily travel choices, but the hidden costs of driving make this difficult. This is a fantastic opportunity to give them that information at their fingertips and encourage them to use public transport, cycle or walk."

David Boyd

Customer Experience Manager, Metlink

The Total Cost of Journey Calculator

The calculator sits within the Metlink Journey Planner, which is part of the website and app, giving direct access to the 200,000 monthly users of the website and the 70,000 monthly users of the Android and iOS apps. The calculator provides the user a breakdown of the total cost and CO2 emissions for different private transport options, including diesel, petrol and electric vehicles compared to public transport.

This provides users with information during the planning and decision-making phase of their journey. Ultimately, the goal is to encourage more users toward public transport and lower-emission options.

Purpose of the Calculator

The Total Cost of Journey Calculator presents comparative emissions and cost information to users, giving richer information to empower them to make more informed decisions about the impact of their travel.

The calculator was aimed at delivering on key goals, including reducing climate impacts, congestion and vehicle dependency by:

Encouraging mode shift to lower-emission transport options
Increasing patronage on public transport
Reducing congestion on the roads, benefiting all road users

Providing Accurate Costs to Users

To ensure the most accurate data for users, we gathered vehicle operating cost information from a wide range of data sources from various government agencies and other organisations.

Other costs like fuel - with variance between petrol stations, for example -had to be averaged. A description of assumptions around cost factors provided transparency for users on how costs are calculated.

Taking an Agile Approach

We applied an Agile methodology to deliver this project over 10 weeks, starting with a 4-week UX Research and Discovery sprint, followed by three two-week sprints to develop the core product functionality.

We began with the core engine development, ensuring future-proof architecture and creating APIs for data retrieval based on specific criteria.

The project culminated in integrating the calculator into the Metlink website and apps, focusing on displaying the overall cost with an option for users to see a breakdown of the costs.

Building a Future-proof Solution

In addition to delivering the calculator, we wanted to take a development approach to the architecture of the system that we could reuse for future use-cases. This would allow the calculator to be ‘white-labelled’ and made available via APIs.

We developed the core engine with Laravel, a maintainable PHP framework, and created APIs for data retrieval based on criteria such as location and vehicle type. This included Mapbox integration for private vehicle routing, allowing distance calculations between two geo-coordinates.

Outcomes

Initial Uptake of the Calculator

Since the release, the calculator has seen a significant uptake. To date, it has been featured on over 260,000 journey plans on the Metlink website.
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We show approximately 170 cost comparison calculations per day.
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Additionally, 68% of users have given feedback that they find the tool useful.

Adding More Value for Metlink Users

The calculator adds value for Metlink users by helping them make more informed decisions about the transportation they use.

By strategically providing users with this information when they are deciding how to best get around, users are more engaged in the decision to use public transport - ultimately reducing climate impacts, congestion and vehicle dependency.

Multiple Use Cases

We also explored how we might be able to leverage the calculator engine for other use cases outside of the Metlink integration.

Potential use cases include using underlying data and calculations to help users see cost comparison of different vehicle types - especially if they are considering switching from petrol or diesel vehicles to EVs, or EV owners interested in estimating their potential cost and CO2 savings annually.