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The bus company has come up with a novel idea – a scheme enabling town residents to rent an electric car by the hour.
LibertyBus General Manager Kevin Hart says that the company wants to run the scheme to target people who live in town and need a car from time to time, but who don’t have any parking.
His comments came in the Unplugged feature of the May edition of Connect magazine, in which he says there were almost half a million more bus journeys last year than the year before.
Mr Hart said: “We’re looking at whether it’s viable to set up a car club.
“Now that seems alien for a bus company. You put bus and car in the same sentence and it’s alien to each other, but we’re looking to see if there’s a car club that we could set up, but it’s purely in the planning stage.
“It wouldn’t just be a car club, it would be an electric car club, to make it green, so basically in St Helier you would pick your car up, you’d rent it by the hour and you’d take it back.
“Bookable online. It’s targeted for people who live in St Helier who either haven’t got parking, haven’t got a car or businesses actually who only need occasional use of cars. We want to link it to our cards, our Avanchi cards.”
Mr Hart also says in the interview that the bus service has expanded – with 39 vehicles running at peak times instead of 28, and with 4,005,000 journeys made last year compared to 3,600,000 in 2013. He also revealed that the £3.5 million States subsidy that LibertyBus receive is less than half that of the previous operator, and that they share their profits with the States.
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