Ride sharing service initiated by local football club PPJ started from an agile pilot and became a permanent activity in the club. After school, school children get transported from school to football training on a minibus. This saves time and reduces the number of total trips otherwise taken by each individual child driven by their [parent]. Lower price of early practice hours compensates the transportation costs.

Ongoing initiative (from 2019 to now)

This initiative impacts climate neutrality in the sense that it reduces the amount of trips that are made by car. After the first trial almost 70% of the parents reported that the project made them feel less like they needed to own a car. 

In Finland, many cities are now looking into offering children more leisure activities after school. Helsinki and Tampere have already launched projects to determine whether the level of children’s physical activity could be increased by enabling them to attend sports practice in the afternoon. The Finnish government is also looking into the possibility of offering all children the chance to pursue a free hobby as part of their school day.

The Kyyti Group is currently working to develop a solution that meets the needs for a shuttle service between schools and sports venues. The goal is that parents will eventually gain access to an app that allows them to manage their children’s rides and track them in real time.

Pallo-Pojat Juniorit (PPJ) is the third-largest football club in Finland and growing rapidly. The club wanted to make more efficient use of its football hall and create new service models to better meet the needs of its junior players and their families. Two PPJ teams tested a ride service in the 2018–2019 season, and the model was scaled up in the 2019–2020 season. In the ride service model, football practice was moved from the evenings to the afternoons and the children were transported from their school to the sports hall and back. The project’s early testing stage was carried out in collaboration with Forum Virium Helsinki’s ‘Last Mile’ project.

• PPJ - Football club
• Forum Virium Helsinki - Funded the initiative as part of the Six City Strategy, Last Mile
• Annika Järvelin - Service Designer
• Children and parents - Users of the service
  
• Cabing - Transport operator

PPJ was accepted into ‘Last Mile’, a project of City of Helsinki innovation company Forum Virium Helsinki. Funded as part of the Six City Strategy, Last Mile sought smart mobility solutions for tourists, residents and commuters in the Jätkäsaari area of Helsinki. 

As an incentive to make teams use the earlier slots in the football hall, the club offered all teams that took up afternoon practice a generous discount on hall fees for all practice times before 5 pm. This discount compensated for the transportation costs of the buses.

PPJ has limited resources and setting up this pilot had cost a lot of time, fortunately they could use the sum that they received from the city of Helsinki to hire service designer Annika Järvelin to run the project.

All parents who responded to PPJ’s survey thought that moving practice to the afternoons was either a good thing or a very good thing. Nine out of ten children also reported this. All parents also thought that the ride service made family life easier, and two-thirds of parents were satisfied with the cost of the service.

The concept created in this project could very well be replicated by other sports clubs. When considering adopting a similar model, the main thing is to ensure that the service will have a high enough utilisation rate and that the distances will be fairly short so that buses can pick up as many children as possible for hourly training sessions. Then again, if the training times could be optimised according to the rides and not vice versa, the service might be more flexible.

Main positive lessons/opportunities identified:

• The service made family life easier for the users
• The children really like riding to practice with their friends
• The service increases the children’s independency

Main failures/barriers identified:

• Preparations took a long time, definitely need a couple of months before launching the service
• If starting such a project, your project is not necessarily the priority of the transport operator
  
• The smaller children may need some ‘behavioural’ rules

• Parent satisfaction
• Children satisfaction
• Saved time
• Reduced amount of trips 
  
• Using the space at PPJ more efficiently