Interview with thierry occelli, sophia antipolis urban community

Interview of Thierry Occelli , VP of the Sophia Antipolis Community (CASA) about the implementation of the Icilà Demand-Responsive Transport.

How is the Sophia Antipolis Urban Community (CASA) specifically adapted to the challenges of shared mobility?

CASA is constantly facing new demands and needs, due to the development of the Sophia Antipolis technopolis. CASA is improving its mobility services and is constantly thinking about how to optimize its solutions, mainly in the area of DRT: to expand the resources allocated to the offer, to span new territories, improve booking processes and its reliability, ensure good customer feedback….

Does CASA already have a DRT solution? For which use cases?

Yes. There is already some very successful DRT solutions in 10 areas under the IciLà brand.

• For school children, the DRT allows trips beyond the traditional hours of school (8am, 5pm). 128,000 journeys have been recorded since it was commissioned a year ago. These trips are carried out on the 24 districts of the agglomeration.
• For mobility impaired people, we provide a more individualized offer because it allows sidewalk to sidewalk trips.
• CASA is often asked to deploy this service in the evening, especially during major one-off events (shows, theatres, etc.).

Why did you choose to launch a new service with Padam Mobility?

The main problem faced by the Sophia Antipolis Urban Community regarding to its DRT is the booking. Our call center is often saturated at the beginning of the week, despite the recent introduction of an online pre-booking plant.

Since the main users of CASA’s DRT are high school teenagers, Padam Mobility will make the bookings easier to those who are more comfortable with smartphones.

The agglomeration tend to digitize and dematerialize all the process, especially the transport tickets. We also rely on Padam Mobility to achieve this goal. Finally, the DRT was certified ISO9001 in March 2019 and meets CASA’s ongoing improvement objectives.

What are the locals expectations of DRT?

To be able to book by themselves, online, and easely.

What about your expectations?

The Sophia Antipolis Urban Community expects a lot from this experimentation with Padam Mobility, involving 12 vehicles on 2 areas. Despite the particularity of our offer (zoning, single operator from the first of July), we desire to collect as much quantitative informations as possible (statistics, survey informations, datas, kms travelled, grouping rate, number of people transported, etc.) and qualitative feedbacks (trips evaluations, etc.) because we don’t have them for the moment.

The point is to gain enough detailed datas for the implementation and KPI’s that evaluate if the DRT solutions are improvable.

Padam Mobility provides extremely detailed statistical reports and will be able to meet these expectations. The introduction of a banner in the application, pointing to a satisfaction survey, allows to have very qualitative feedback.

We advocate the responsiveness of our solutions. Like CASA’s dynamic carpooling approach, we want dynamic DRT.

What other innovations are you preparing for shared mobility?

CASA is constantly considering new mobility solutions and has recently embarked on an experimentation of autonomous vehicles on public roads. An experiment on a dedicated track has already taken place in 2016, and now we would like to experiment it in general traffic conditions and on a specific area of Sophia Antipolis (last mile management and intermodality with the future Bustram line).

Padam Mobility works with autonomous vehicle players to offer on demand autonomous vehicles.

Regarding soft mobility, CASA has launched its own bike plan with electric bicycles, opened bike paths with the possibility to use forest tracks, enhanced home-to-work trips, improved traffic black spots, created a bike house in Sophia Antipolis with 10 and soon 20 bikes available, free of charge to users, to promote electric bicycles… Finally, the Sophia Antipolis cycling community was created and already has 500 members.

Thierry Occelli, vice president of the Sophia Antipolis Urban Community.

About Icilà, the Demand-Responsive Transport service of Sophia Antipolis

Launched in July 2019 with Envibus, icilà is a DRT service which meets a great success. With +6600 trips per month for around 37000 passengers.km, the service answers mobility needs in low-density areas of the Sophia Antipolis urban community and at the same time contributes to its digital transformation.

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