Spin to deliver sustainable transport for the University of California San Diego

Two Ford Mobility companies have announced a new five-year exclusive agreement with the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego). Spin, a micro-mobility provider, and TransLoc, a transportation software solutions company, are combining efforts to deliver and integrate sustainable transportation modes, improving how the university’s 75,000 students, faculty and staff move around campus.

“The university has a long-standing commitment to reduce our carbon footprint while also supporting healthy, efficient transit opportunities for a large and diverse campus population,” said UC San Diego’s Vice Chancellor for Resource Management and Planning, Gary Matthews. “With the combined services of Spin and TransLoc, the university reduces its carbon emissions, leverages our investment in transportation and makes the final leg of commutes easier for faculty, students and staff. We’re excited to watch this vision of unified transit expand and evolve in the coming years.”

Spin’s relationship with UC San Diego started in 2017 with 50 shared pedal-bikes on campus. This new agreement brings 600 shared e-bikes and e-scooters to the campus, enhanced through a network of Spin Hub charging stations, which include digital screens that show riders real-time campus transit data to help them to better plan their journey. During the first month of fall 2021 alone, the campus community took more than 63,000 trips, resulting in more than 53,000 miles.

“At Spin, our mission is to use micro-mobility to create a 15-minute city – where anyone can get to any important location within 15 minutes,” said Ben Bear, Spin’s CEO. “College campuses such as UC San Diego truly operate like small cities, and working with TransLoc will help us to advance our goal of easing the transportation journey.”

Transit orchestration software will support UC San Diego’s existing transit system to more efficiently dispatch and track more than 40 buses along fixed routes on campus to provide riders with real-time data on bus status, location and capacity.

In 2022, TransLoc software will also power UC San Diego’s small buses and low-speed electric passenger vehicles to provide door-to-door service on campus for students, faculty and staff with mobility challenges, and on-demand services to the full campus community during non-peak evening hours, when operating full-size buses would be unsustainable.