43 Respondents Showed Us Where We Were Still Guessing

What an early J-Pool survey revealed about safety, location, and the gap between saying yes and showing up.

Two people leave the same building at the same hour and walk towards the same stop.

One is thinking about the time. The other is thinking about the walk.

That gap is the clearest thing our early research found, and it shaped the product more than any single statistic did.

While building the J-Pool MVP, we ran a small exploratory survey: 43 respondents, 29 questions. Travel routines. Reliability. Safety. Existing sharing behaviour. Trust. Willingness to take part, and what people actually wanted in return.

Forty-three responses were never going to validate a market. That wasn’t the job. The job was to challenge our assumptions while the product was still soft enough to change shape.

The overall patterns were useful. The differences between people were far more useful.

The same journey carries different risk

Late-night travel was the strongest friction point across the whole sample. But it was not felt evenly.

Almost 74 per cent of female respondents named late night as when they felt least safe. Among male respondents, that figure was just over 52 per cent.

The same pattern ran through what people wanted before they would participate at all:

• Knowing who they’d travel with mattered highly to around 90 per cent of women, against roughly 77 per cent of men.
• Verified profiles were selected by 85 per cent of women and just over 68 per cent of men.

Here is the part we didn’t expect. None of this produced a gender gap in interest. Around nine in ten respondents of both genders said they would, or might, use a trusted shared-journey platform.

So the question was never who wants this. It was what has to be true before someone feels able to say yes. Same destination, different entry requirements.

Where you live changes what “unreliable” means

Splitting the sample by location produced the second signal.

Every single rural or estate respondent who answered identified late night as difficult for finding reliable transport. Every one. Compare that with roughly 63 per cent in city centres and 47 per cent in suburbs.

Rural and estate respondents also leaned more strongly towards sharing within their own organisation or community.

Now the caveat, and it’s a real one: that rural subgroup was small enough that a single response could move the percentage noticeably. We can’t build a conclusion on it.

What we can do is stop assuming transport friction looks the same everywhere. It doesn’t. Not across a country, and not even across one city.

We weren’t inventing a behaviour. We were formalising one.

More than two thirds of participants told us they already share journeys, regularly or occasionally, usually with family, friends and colleagues.

And they coordinate it through WhatsApp threads, phone calls and hallway conversations.

The behaviour already exists. It’s just invisible, unrecorded and impossible to rely on if you aren’t already in the group chat.

That reframed the MVP entirely. We stopped asking whether people could be persuaded to share journeys. We started asking whether something people already do informally could be made visible, dependable and easy to coordinate.

Different question. Different product.

Trust wasn’t a feeling. It was a checklist.

When people described trust, almost nobody described it emotionally. They described mechanics.

Verified identities. The ability to choose who they travel with. Clearer community context. Real accountability. Safety, privacy, reliability and personal control came up again and again in the written responses.

That was one of the most directly useful findings we got, because it closed off an easy option. “Trust” couldn’t sit on the landing page as a promise. It had to live in how people join, how they’re shown to each other, and how they decide.

Nine in ten said yes. That’s the number we trust least.

High stated interest is the easiest result to over-read, so we’ll be blunt about it: openness is not demand.

Respondents told us regular use would depend on affordability, convenience, reliability, safety and access through communities they already trust. Those are conditions, not endorsements.

One finding did genuinely encourage us. Potential Hosts weren’t primarily motivated by money. Helping others ranked above additional income and above offsetting travel costs. Personal and community value may well reinforce each other rather than compete.

But someone clicking “yes” or “maybe” in a survey has risked nothing. The same person facing a real time, a real price and a real stranger may decide differently.

Which is exactly why every one of these findings now has to meet reality.

What 43 people cannot tell you

We’d rather publish the limits than let anyone over-read the results.

The sample was self-selected and geographically concentrated. Around two thirds of participants were based in Aberdeen, and non-university employees were the largest occupational group. Some subgroup comparisons rest on very small numbers. Several questions allowed multiple selections. Not everyone answered everything.

There was also a design flaw worth naming. We put questions about offering journeys to the full sample rather than only to people who own or regularly drive a car. That means our headline Host-interest figure cannot be treated as an estimate of real Host supply. It tells us about appetite, not availability.

None of this makes the research worthless. It makes it correctly sized.

This was an early discovery exercise. It was never a representative study of Scotland, and we won’t present it as one.

What actually changed

The survey’s real output wasn’t answers. It was five sharper questions:

• Do safety expectations differ meaningfully between participant groups?
• How does location shape reliability and willingness to share?
• Can informal, existing arrangements translate into consistent platform use?
• Which trust signals influence real decisions, rather than stated ones?
• Does interest survive contact with an actual journey?

The value of this survey was not that 43 people agreed with us.

It was that they showed us precisely where we were still guessing.

The MVP turned those signals into a product. The pilot will tell us which ones were real.