Innovation Tagline: Reducing vehicle emissions from individual passenger-car travle is critical to mitigating climate change. Given the increasing transportation demands of rising urban populations, it is now more crucial than ever to explore and implement solutions that lessen a vehicle's carbon footprint.
Project Keywords: #travelwiz, #lesscarbon, #tokenrewards, #car-bonfreetravel
Project Members
- Daniel Durham, @travelwiz
Project Description (no more than 1,000 words including graphics)
By enabling the creation of verifiable trips for a roaming entity, through a time-stamped location authenticator, TravelWiz Trip Tracer (TWTT), vehicle-owners can be encouraged and rewarded for tracking their movements and carbon emissions. Using blockchain as a trust anchor, the TWTT will enable more transparent, accurate, and tamper proof tracking and tracing. TravelWiz vision is to encourage a safer, more efficient and rewarding mobility future for individuals and corporations, especially those that encourage remote-working opportunities, that support the reduction of vehicle emissions for not driving and/or using alternative modes of transportation.
Problem
a. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. According to the Hedges Company, there were 287 million registered cars in the U.S. in 2020.
b. Inadequate mass transportation solutions on a national level.
c. Current options for reducing individual passenger transport include car share options, Zip Car, and ride share options, Lyft and Uber.
Solution
a. A token-based rewards program for consumers that car share, ride share and/or work remotely.
b. With a token-based system, consumers can accumulate TWZ tokens to be used in conjunction with participants in our partner program or sold/traded on the open market.
c. Our key feature will be the token-based rewards program utilizing a blockchain yet to be selected. Our MVP will enable the team to receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve our token offering and to ensure the information collected is accurate and verifiable.
Accomplishment and Team
a. Daniel Durham has a passion for reducing the amount of cars on the road, and vehicle miles traveled, in an effort to reduce vehicle-based emissions. His Masters thesis was based on exploring the possibilities for a cap and trade program utilizing solid research with regard to car sharing platforms.
b. Being fairly new as to how to best utilize the blockchain/Hyperledger for my project, I need development assistance and could use help developing a sound business model.
Project Plan
Our main goal is to create a token-based rewards system, utilizing the latest blockchain/Hyperledger technology, for the purpose of engaging with and supporting/rewarding individuals for driving less or not at all. The TWZ token price structure will be in alignment with current carbon offset pricing. Tokens will be issued to individuals that participate and agree to allow TravelWiz to track their vehicle usage and emissions. In months 1-6, we should have a clearly mapped out plan with regard to which Hyperledger template will best suit our purpose and a team that can assists us in implementing a strategy. Months 6-12 will be spent on creating the token, issuance criteria, defining our social impact and creating and implementing our marketing strategy.
First and foremost, we must clearly understand current driving behavior i.e. what is the importance of owning a vehicle. It will also be important to understand why some individuals choose to not drive at all. Equally important will be sharing the data of the risk vs the rewards of vehicle ownership and being able to make the case against it when feasible to do so. The data should also identify individuals willing to limit the amount of miles they drive each year with the intention of being rewarded for doing so. We would like to identify those eager to participate in the shared vehicle, ride share, car share, economy. Partnerships with companies, car share, ride share and mass transit, will be crucial to implementing our strategy and realizing our goal of creating a society where people are being rewarded for choosing to limit/adjust their driving behavior or for choosing not to drive at all.
The main risk associated with creating something of value, tokens, is to ensure to the public, and SEC, that we are not creating a security or public offering of any kind. There are several use cases the we can model in order to better understand how to do this in a manner that doesn't incur a series of legal battles that would keep the project from moving forward.