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Designing cities for their inhabitants, both today and tomorrow, means asking ourselves about their potential futures and major developments in terms of pressure points predicted for the next 10, 20, or 30 years. Above all, this allows us to reflect on the role that RATP Group can play in co-constructing a desirable future for city dwellers. We thus see innovation as a great tool, no matter the era, when it comes to thinking and creating a future in line with citizens’ challenges and aspirations.
Although the metro is now part of everyday life in Paris, we should not forget that its creation, in 1900, marked a truly innovative break with the past. RATP Group’s commitment to innovation is indeed nothing new. The first automatic metro (in 1998, with line 14), the Navigo smart card (in the late 1990s) and the automation of line 1 with no major traffic disruptions (in 2012) are all examples of innovation and often world firsts, marking 70 years of RATP history.
As a service company, RATP Group seizes upon the technical potential offered by new technologies, transforming them into services for passengers. Innovation enables us to create new offers, for example through autonomous vehicles, allowing us to provide a door-to-door service or to offer a service in lower-density areas.
It also helps us make our existing operations more efficient, thus improving the service provided to passengers. Using data allows us to better organise the way metro trains are divided, in accordance with passenger needs. Artificial intelligence can produce live translation of passenger announcements in several languages. From another perspective, innovation can also be regarded as a method enabling the company to build a body of knowledge to draw upon in order to create value. It is also a way to engage employees, encouraging them to take the initiative and instigate change themselves.
The future of mobility will undoubtedly be digital and fully integrated, with Mobility as a Service (Maas), which aims to offer tailor-made, seamless and uninterrupted transport solutions. Above all, we must aim for a well thought-out, truly inter-modal mobility, and even perhaps embrace a form of “immobility”, with new developments such as teleworking. New technologies and data should be used to improve passengers’ everyday lives and work towards a smoother-running, connected, sustainable and inclusive city.
Our approach is people-focused - the end goal of any innovation policy.
At the moment, commuter vehicle occupancy rates average at just 1.2 people. In other words, the vast majority of drivers are alone in their vehicles, causing pollution and congestion. Setting up a public transport offer rivalling cars in terms convenience in low density areas is nevertheless difficult and expensive.
Shared electric autonomous shuttles are a possible last-mile solution for low-density areas.
Shared electric autonomous shuttles can complement the existing transport offer. These vehicles – for example the EZ10 operating at Château de Vincennes – offer first-to-last-mile mobility, making city centre traffic run more smoothly and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as freeing up land used for parking spaces and reducing noise pollution. This solution is very much in line with a vision of future mobility as necessarily green and accessible to all, but also flexible, offering a demand-responsive service.
New technologies in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, are key to defining a new mobility offer. Increasingly sophisticated data processing, combined with predictive algorithms, will soon allow to anticipate user needs at any time, and to adapt the transport offer as a result. A smooth-running, high-quality, dynamic service must be provided at a reasonable cost if we are to convince motorists to change their habits and leave the comfort of their individual cars to embrace shared transport modes.
EasyMile, founded in Toulouse in 2014, provides autonomous mobility solutions to local governments, transport operators and even universities. It operates in cities such as Denver, Berlin and Singapore, with 210 driverless transport projects to date, carrying over 320,000 passengers and covering a total distance of 250,000 kilometres.
EasyMile and RATP Group have been working together for several years on offering alternatives to cars for short journeys, for example between Château de Vincennes metro station and the Parc Floral de Paris.
RATP Group has already conducted several autonomous shuttle trials around the world, notably in Austin, Brussels, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Saclay and Vincennes, carrying nearly 100,000 passengers. It has worked with various operators in these cities, including EasyMile and Navya, and secured a world first in Vincennes by achieving interoperability between autonomous shuttles from different manufacturers.
RATP Group’s expertise in autonomous vehicles is now widely recognised.
Indeed, in 2019, ADEME (French Environment and Energy Management Agency) entrusted the Group with 3 trials in the Île-de-France region as part of the SAM (Safety and Acceptability of autonomous driving and Mobility) project consortium, under France’s national Autonomous Vehicles programme. These 3 trials tested autonomous mobility services aiming to meet genuine transport demands in various environments: dense urban areas and suburban areas. They responded to different user requirements, complementing the existing transport offer, with first and last-mile services and by covering otherwise unserved areas.
Autonomous shuttles respond to real mobility challenges faced by cities and their inhabitants in the quest for consistent service in all regions. They offer an innovative solution to the challenges of low-density areas, low passenger flows and first and last-mile services, and can be harmoniously integrated within cities by complementing the existing mobility offer.
Autonomous transport offers a wide range of possibilities for adapting public transport in cities.
RATP Group, a pioneer in the development of innovative local-area transport modes, is set to put an autonomous bus into commercial service by the end of the year on route 393, connecting Thiais to Sucy-Bonneuil in Val-de-Marne. This route, running on its own dedicated lane, really lends itself to this trial.
There is always an operator aboard the autonomous bus to look after passengers and handle any problems.
Making mobility accessible to everyone, everywhere, in a satisfactory manner, is now a major challenge. Innovation, and its acceptance at large, is crucial to this endeavour. It contributes to the development of mobility solutions tailored to regional needs, according to their specificities, population, and actual economy.
Making mobility accessible to everyone, everywhere, in a satisfactory manner, is now a major challenge.
Cities are currently facing many challenges: as their urban populations grow, so does the demand for transport services. Alternatives to traditional solutions have thus been on the rise over the last few years (shared bicycles, free-floating scooters, carpooling, etc.), gradually altering city dwellers’ mobility behaviour. MaaS (Mobility as a Service) applications support these transformations by centralising the mobility offer to better inform passengers. Despite these advances, there are still question marks over how these services should intersect to make them as efficient as possible. The aim is thus to organise an enlarged, coherent transport network to meet the population’s needs.
There is still room for transport authorities and operators to further develop their offers to really transform the mobility landscape. In response to this new context, Citio has come up with a solution using the data available to transport operators to synchronise the various offers and best respond to user behaviour. Citio’s smart data collection measures travel habit development more precisely, regularly, and dynamically than conventional field studies. This raw material can thus be leveraged to improve decision-making, operations performance and local transport quality. On a practical level, this allows journey times to be adapted to traffic conditions, for example, or metro cars to be added in the right place at the right time.
Increasing service efficiency is of real benefit to passengers. I see the city as a meeting place for its inhabitants, where opportunities – whether professional, social, cultural, or even sporting – intersect. Facilitating mobility allows everyone to make the most of these various opportunities.
The ideal future would see us able to fully meet all user needs with our urban mobility offer. Smart data is one of the levers through which this could be achieved.
La Défense is Europe’s largest business district. Its 180,000 employees tend to work very similar hours. This logically leads to traffic saturation, both on the roads and in public transport. The frequency of RER line A, for example, makes it impossible from a technical standpoint to add more trains to meet rush hour demand, even though 2-floor cars are already in use throughout the line.
There are major projects in the pipeline – an extension of EOLE and the Grand Paris Express – to improve the overall transport offer, but innovative shorter-term solutions are nevertheless required.
In January 2019, Île-de-France Mobilités launched a trial with 14 partner companies, in partnership with Paris La Défense’s local body, RATP and SNCF, to explore how employee working hours could be spread more evenly, easing peak-time transport demand by distributing it over longer time slots. Île-de-France Mobilités convinced the hub’s companies to encourage wider-ranging employee working hours, along with the move to active transport modes, carpooling, teleworking and third place use. A mobility challenge was launched to reward employees willing to change their habits, using a points system for them to earn coupons redeemable at Quatre-Temps shopping centre retailers. A great deal of energy was required to overcome reluctance and answer all questions.
This initiative was only possible thanks to strong involvement from the regional authorities and all players involved, ensuring the companies’ efforts were met with effective organisation from operators. RATP thus equipped all access routes to La Défense’s transport hub with 3-D sensors to continuously measure passenger flow. Processing and in-depth analysis of this data by RATP and IAU, under the aegis of IDFM, will allow these actions’ impact to be precisely evaluated, with a view to extending the trial to other sites.
The RATP Capital Innovation Fund is an RATP Group subsidiary dedicated to investing in start-ups, innovative mobility services and Smart Cities. It aims to enable the Group to identify appropriate innovations to meet specific needs for the regions in which it works. We seek to create synergies with companies offering such solutions to better serve cities and passengers. The fund’s collaboration with these companies goes beyond finance alone, fostering their collaboration with RATP Group in the Île-de-France region and elsewhere in the world. We are proud to be helping these businesses grow. Like us, they are keen to take action to give residents optimal ways of getting around.
We are aware that, while public transport forms the backbone of city travel, new services will also be an integral part of the future mobility landscape. We are also convinced that the self-service electric scooters provided by Cityscoot, or short-ride carpooling set up by Klaxit, are great responses to urban mobility challenges. Transport needs to be cleaner, more sustainable and, above all, more inclusive in order to be accessible to as many people as possible. These companies really understand this need, and their solutions are a step forward in this direction. Supporting them creates a positive ecosystem, encouraging people to shift from individual car use to greener modes that complement public transport.
The year 2019 could be considered a pivotal year for mobility, especially in urban areas. A whole series of new transport solutions are emerging in cities thanks to process innovations such as free floating. These new developments will not, however, be able to last unless they are better regulated. Cityscoot, a shared electric scooter service, is a sustainable micro-mobility solution, meeting a dual expectation from urban dwellers. These eco-friendly scooters are approved and insured to allow users to get around quickly and safely. Such developments are relevant for customers, as well as elected officials calling for new mobility solutions to be integrated in harmony with the city and its inhabitants.
RATP is supporting Cityscoot in its development as it extends to new cities where the Group already operates. Beyond their financial partnership, there is a clear synergy between the two companies and their business activities. Surveys conducted to observe how users combine the two services have shown how they can complement each other, particularly for last-mile challenges, for which scooters are a real alternative. Common pricing systems are also being considered to make users’ lives easier.
