Community for Impact
How can we turn travel time into quality time?
Build a shared vision
Prototype
Experiment
Movin'On members
Contributing partners
The SmartShuttle Community of Interest explores opportunities to increase the use of shared transport for business travel and help decarbonize transport.
The Community of Interest aims to prototype, assess and then deploy an attractive shared transport solution for the business market. The Community of Interest is developing a service concept called SmartShuttle that addresses the following challenges: seamless connectivity, confidential conversations, thermal conditions that help reduce fatigue, and seating arrangements that enable people to work together. The aim is to turn travel time into productive time and encourage modal shift by making it less necessary for users to travel in their personal cars.
Since 2017, Michelin and Movin’On have run one-off coach travel trials for Michelin teams and inter-company groups as part of various events, including journeys between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand. These trials highlighted the value of this type of solution for Michelin: a lower environmental impact combined with more productive use of the team’s time than competing solutions.
In early 2019, at the initiative of Michelin, Orange and Saint-Gobain, around ten companies came together to address the issue of shared transport for business travel and create a SmartShuttle Community of Interest within Movin’On. Once the concept had been developed, it became clear that a mobility operator was essential to bring it to life. bertolami therefore joined the Community’s core group in 2021. Each of these four complementary partner companies contributed its expertise to co-create and bring SmartShuttle to life, turning ambition into action…
Movin’On hosted the SmartShuttle Community of Interest and has coordinated all the initiatives carried out since 2019.
bertolami, a family-owned passenger transport company based in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, made one of its Cityliner coaches available to the Community of Interest. The model could be given a new lease of life by transforming it into the SmartShuttle concept. bertolami also contributed to defining and implementing the prototype’s operating environment.
Orange, an innovation leader using digital technology to advance sustainable mobility, co-leads this Community of Interest. In 2019, Orange organized a trial service between the employment areas of Lannion and Rennes using a coach that already offered a high level of comfort and would help shape the next stages of the transformation. Orange coordinated work on onboard Wi-Fi connectivity and vehicle-to-ground communications, using an antenna system and a suitably adapted mobile router, in collaboration with WiiBus.
Saint-Gobain, which has a long-standing presence in the transport market through its glazing solutions for coaches, also sees the value of a solution that encourages modal shift to coach travel by improving the passenger experience. Saint-Gobain equipped SmartShuttle with two types of innovative glazing: windows providing optimum thermal comfort in every season, and transparent partitions in the passenger compartment that can serve as screens comparable to those in a meeting room.
The SmartShuttle Community of Interest follows a phased, iterative methodology.
Assess the interest and motivation of the target audiences
Bring the concept to life by developing a prototype.
Experiment and assess.
Improve the existing solution based on feedback and lessons learned.
Produce an optimized version
