Happy New Year!
I think we’re all glad to see the back of 2020, and although Covid-19 is still with us, we hope a lot will change for the better this year with the vaccination rollouts in progress.
In a strange way many of us will feel as though we lost an entire a year, having been unable to see friends and family or do the activities we’d like to have done. Personally, my plans to start playing rugby and cricket again were thwarted but having 3 small children at home for most of the year I have become an expert in finger-painting and snail-racing. I also have a massively increased respect for teachers and childcare professionals.
There are better things you could be doing with your life
Although we can’t give you the year back, what we do believe is that in the future Eloy can give everyone an extra day each year. Here’s how.
The average driver spends 9 hours a week in their car which is more than they do socialising. And a lot of that time is wasted time, stuck in traffic jams, waiting for traffic lights to change, and according to the British Parking Authority up to 8 minutes per trip is spent looking for parking spaces. That’s 4 days a year driving round streets or circling car parks searching for that elusive parking spot.
So our goal is to reduce that time wasted, with a preliminary goal of cutting down the time by 25%. And give everyone back an extra day every year.
Estimate of impact
Eloy’s app has a number of core functions that are designed to help reduce traffic and parking stress. SatNav mapping and routing linked with driver communications and a data engine will theoretically allow us to add machine learning to drivers’ daily actions, including time looking for parking spaces.
We think this is a really cool idea but wanted to test how it would work in the real world. So we teamed up with the University of Bristol to understand quantitatively how much time we could save people.
With some very basic analytics we found that we could save people up to 15% of the time they spend looking for parking. That’s already more than halfway to achieving our 25% goal. Coupled with the associated reduction in emissions, pollutions, and stress, we’re confident Eloy can help make the roads a better place to be.
Less time driving around at snail’s pace, more time snail-racing
We have also looked at the impact of enhanced real-time information on driving. Whilst this isn’t specific to Eloy, avoiding traffic jams and finding more suitable parking spaces could easily save an additional 10% of time which gets another step closer to our 25% goal. We think we can increase this saving even further with better data and analytics solutions.
Rolling out savings
This year Eloy plans to test this hypothesis. We will be running some live experiments on the roads with a pool of recruited drivers and we expect to start gathering data in the first few months of this year with a full statistical piece of analysis in the second half of the year. Once we’re happy with the results then we’ll be able to reveal how we can roll this solution out across the UK.
After losing so much time last year, we hope people will see the value of an extra day every year in the future.
What will you do with yours?
