Carpooling and behaviour change

A simple issue we had related to travel was the fact that we have two sites, the Climate Innovation District in Leeds, and Little Kelham in Sheffield. Most Citu staff are based at our Leeds offices, but many often need to travel to our Little Kelham site to supervise the construction or carry out viewings.

We realized five members of staff were driving to the Sheffield site from home, taking five separate cars. This was not something we felt was sustainable, as we do our upmost to mitigate every aspect of our impact on the environment and keep our carbon emissions as low as possible.

For the Leeds staff traveling to the Sheffield site, we instituted a system where they could all take a single electric car that would not cause any emissions. The average passenger vehicle emits 411 grams of CO2 per mile. The five vehicles were generating 71 kg of CO2 emissions on every trip. That adds up to three and a half tones of CO2 emissions in a typical year of weekly journeys. Therefore, by traveling in only one electric vehicle CO2 savings are several tonnes per year.


Citu saved a great deal in travel expenses, as rather than compensating five people taking five vehicles for fuel costs, there was only one electric vehicle which is extremely inexpensive to refuel.

The move has been well received by the Citu team and has brought many benefits. Aside from reducing emissions, it has also prevented wear and tear on team member’s cars, and allowed them to have meetings on the way to the Sheffield development, and thus use time more efficiently.  It’s always hard to affect behavioural change, but being low carbon is our entire purpose, so the staff have been completely on board from the start.

For many of us, it’s why we came to work for Citu in the first place.