The transportation sector urgently needs to cut carbon emissions, with passenger vehicles responsible for 75% of energy-related CO2 emissions.⁹ Reducing reliance on private cars is critical—but it’s also important to acknowledge the emissions from transit systems, including those we help power.
‍
Our partners generate greenhouse gas emissions 
‍
As a software company, Spare doesn’t directly move people from A to B in physical vehicles; that’s what our partners do (transit agencies, ridehail companies, and so on). Since January 2019, we have empowered our partners to transport over 18 million passengers, traveling 170 million kilometers in the process. That’s equivalent to traveling to the moon and back over 220 times! 

Our customers don’t provide these trips using e-scooters or bicycles or wingsuits; they deliver them using road vehicles, most of which run on gasoline or diesel. Even the electricity that powers the electric vehicles on our platform has a carbon cost associated with it. The result? Every trip powered by Spare emits some greenhouse gases.

The average trip on Spare Platform emits roughly 4 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)—a number we’ve worked hard to reduce by 15% since last year.

That all works out to our partners emitting ~74,000 tonnes CO2e overall. You'd need 6 million party balloons to capture the same amount of CO2!

We help the transportation sector to avoid greenhouse gas emissions 

How much carbon would have been emitted to serve 18 million trips if Spare didn’t exist? Let’s break it down.

By their very nature, our partners’ services do two things:
‍
1. They create new trips (‘induced trips’) that would never have happened otherwise 
2. They replace trips that would have happened on other transportation modes (‘mode shift’).

From our rider surveys, we know:

• 33% of the trips taking place on Spare platform are ‘induced’ trips, meaning they add GHGs by enabling access to jobs, schools, and healthcare.
• Of the remaining 67% of trips that are not induced, about half would have happened in a private car or a taxi. These modes emit far more GHGs than Spare-powered services, because they’re not shared. Of course, our customers’ services also shift a small minority of people away from greener modes such as buses, cycling and walking.

Combining our data from mode shift and trip induction, we find that Spare has helped customers avoid approximately 5,500 tonnes CO2e. That equates to removing 1,300 cars off the road, or planting 110,000 trees.

Every Spare employee helps avoid 2.8 tonnes CO2e per month
‍
By taking our overall net impact as a company and dividing it by the number of Spare employees, we estimate that each employee helps to avoid almost 3 tonnes CO2e every month. Encouragingly, that trend has continually increased over time, even as we’ve grown as a company.

Today, our net impact equates to eliminating 36 transatlantic flights per employee annually – and it makes every day at work worth it.

Spare is net zero
‍
Finally, to understand our ‘net’ carbon impact as a company, we compare two sets of emissions: the emissions we helped the transportation sector to avoid versus Spare’s own ‘back-office’ emissions from building and selling our software. 

Our back-office emissions come from:

• Business travel (the largest contributor)
• Office lighting and heating
• Server energy
• Employee commuting

Since January 2019, these operations have emitted 1,380 tonnes of CO2e, adding just 1.9% to the total emissions of our customers’ service operations.

In 2024, our back-office emissions remained steady, even as we grew as a company—thanks to efforts like limiting flights.

So, let’s do the math. We’ve helped the transportation sector avoid 5,500 tonnes CO2e, while emitting 1,380 tonnes ourselves. That means we help avoid 4x more carbon emissions than we emit. 

This confirms the statement we first made in our 2022 Global Impact Report: we are net zero, and we’re proud to still be the only company in our industry to show our working to prove it.