Traffic turnaround for advanced
Is this the new freedom and the royal road to the mobility revolution? More and more companies are granting their employees a freely available mobility budget instead of a company car (or job ticket). The background: many employees would like to be able to flexibly combine different transport options for their own mobility. This may be in order to use particularly sustainable or particularly inexpensive modes of transport or to choose a mobility option that is also ideally suited to their individual living and working environments, depending on the situation.
One attractive point from the employee's point of view is the high degree of flexibility. As a rule, they have a certain amount of their mobility budget at their free disposal. They can use it for trips between work and home, but also for travel. The central feature of a mobility budget is the freedom to choose between practically all types of alternative mobility. Employees can use their budget for an e-scooter or public transport, for car sharing, shuttle on demand, cab rides, flights and even car repairs. If the employer grants the option of saving or converting the monthly budget, even non-related uses such as subsidies for old-age provision or a new smartphone are possible. Or of course - which seems more obvious - the purchase of your own e-bike and/or electric car.
Companies benefit from greater employee satisfaction and other benefits
Certainly, the hoped-for switch to electromobility, which is considered climate-friendly, is one of the key motivations for companies to opt for a mobility budget. After all, according to the "Mobility and Fleet Barometer Germany 2021" of the Arval Mobility Observatory [1], 31 percent of German companies already use this instrument.
The paradigm shift from the company car to self-determined mobility for your employees also pays off for companies in several ways outside of the sustainability concept. Budget solutions help to save costs in fleet management, and reducing the size of the company car fleet also lowers expenditure on acquisition, maintenance and administration. This way, companies no longer spend money on services that are not called upon or do not correspond to real everyday mobility. As a rule, the effort involved in manual travel expense reports is also eliminated. Many service providers already offer online solutions or apps so that travel costs or other mobility expenses can be efficiently recorded within the corporate budget solution. Last but not least, a social component speaks in favor of the mobility budget, because it often benefits all employees - so even those who were previously not included in the classic company car model benefit.
Another attractive aspect of switching from company cars to the colorful world of budget mobility is that a company then has to list fewer vehicles with combustion engines in its sustainability balance sheet. Whether employees will lease such a vehicle from their freely available budget is another matter.
However, one thing should be clear in the discussion about mobility budgets: Despite all the postulated possibilities of alternative mobility, the car remains the linchpin for individual mobility. Fleet service provider Fleet Europe asked employees what types of benefits they would like to see from their employers: 71 percent named investments in their private mobility - a figure only just behind health benefits (77%) and education and training (84%). What is truly remarkable about the survey published in 2023 is the ranking of the most popular company mobility benefits in Germany: mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) comes in at 11 percent, car-sharing solutions at 12 percent, public transportation offerings at 27 percent and bicycle leasing at 38 percent. The clear winner of the popularity scale remains ... [drum roll] ... the car with 82 percent. [2]
The car remains number 1 - but where are the control options?
"Don't forget the Car" is the title Fleet Europe has given to this part of the evaluation. And we should add: "Don't forget the parking". Because without an adequate supply of parking spaces, there is no automobility.
Consequently, the same applies to any form of mobility budget: parking must be considered just as much as the car. Firstly, every vehicle used individually requires one or more parking spaces on any given day. This applies to electric cars as well as internal combustion engines, to stand-up scooters as well as e-bikes. Secondly, not having a parking management system reveals an error in thinking when calculating the mobility budget, because parking is a significant cost factor - whether for the company or the employees. An example from Düsseldorf shows that a parking space in a reasonable location can quickly cost 100 to 200 euros per month. [3] If you say A for car in the context of a mobility budget, you also have to say P for parking.
In order to adequately integrate this P factor into a budget concept, transparency about the use of budgets is again required. But can this even be reconciled with total freedom of choice in mobility behavior? Absolutely, because only in this way can responsibly acting companies reserve control options through which they can promote mobility behavior that is in line with their strategy and values.
What a lack of transparency and management of mobility can do is illustrated by the option outlined above of financing a private combustion engine instead of a company-owned one via a mobility budget. Releasing a budget should not mean foregoing the management of mobility. On the contrary, transparency even opens up new and flexible options for this - especially via the lever of parking management. Parking can therefore be an important component of the mobility concept or mobility budget.
Parking is still underestimated when designing mobility budgets
Experience shows that the topic of parking is often still underestimated when designing mobility budgets. And not only as a relevant cost factor, but even more so in terms of its potential to strategically influence employee mobility. It is only logical to include a price tag for parking spaces in the mobility budget - as is the case with leased vehicles or public transport tickets.
The allocation of time-defined parking permits results in a kind of "parking lot sharing" - far more parking transactions per period can be represented on the same space than on a non-dynamized space.
Dynamic pricing is the ideal management tool for this purpose
As soon as these freely configurable parking permits carry some kind of price tag, companies can use them to motivate their employees to use certain solutions for their mobility. What can this look like in practice? Let's start with the simplest option: a fixed monthly price for a vehicle parking space on the company premises. However, this would be giving away the control potential of dynamic parking management. It would make much more sense to set individual prices for parking transactions in order to create incentives. Only the dynamic adjustment of "prices" makes it possible to control traffic flows.
For example, companies working with mobility budgets could set a certain number of points for each "parking day". Those who park less can use their points in other ways, such as leasing a company bicycle. Equally conceivable are bonuses for employees who more often do without a car and parking space - or, conversely, leave their vehicle on company premises for longer periods of time. Companies that want to promote the switch to electromobility could use digital parking space management to reserve parking spaces with charging points for e-cars. In the same way, it could be specified in the digital parking management system that, for example, the first three parking processes per month remain free of charge. The possibilities for dynamic pricing are practically unlimited.
Direct interfaces between management of mobility budgets and parking operations
All dynamic models of this kind can be easily created and managed with parkoneer. At the same time, the reports of the parkoneer tool allow interesting analyses of the usage behavior. Do I achieve the desired control effect? Which parking product is particularly in demand? How is the utilization of the parking areas over the day, the week, the month? With this knowledge, parking products can be adjusted to meet demand at any time.
No matter how companies structure the P factor within their mobility budgets: Parking today is digital and can therefore play an important role in promoting a different kind of mobility.
