Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this meeting.
Good morning also to Mr. Iacono, the MP for Alfred-Pellan.
For about 15 years, smart transportation has been in the DNA of the Société de transport de Laval. There are a number of definitions of smart transportation, but for us, it is about enhancing customer experience and influencing sustainable behaviour by using information technologies.
I will quickly go over some of the projects we have carried out that place STL among North American leaders in terms of the development of smart transportation solutions. Then I will suggest some areas worthy of exploration and research in the future.
On the next slide, About STL, the figures give you an idea of our size. Our company is located in a suburb of Montreal. It is medium-sized and has about 900 employees. Our network handles 21 million trips per year.
On the next slide, you can see that the first area in which we invested in smart transportation was information for our customers. We are in the process of implementing three projects.
The first, which we called STL Synchro, started in 2010 and involved equipping each of our vehicles with GPS so that we can provide customers with information about when their bus will arrive. We have displays in the streets and, with a mobile app, people can find out where their bus is.
In 2012, we refined that technology so that everyone using the Paratransit service receives an automatic call about the location of the vehicle 10 minutes or so prior to its arrival.
We decided to push that concept a little further. Working with a development centre for the intellectually challenged, we are in the process of developing an app that will allow people who currently use the Paratransit network to use the regular network by providing them with a companion, a helper. The helper will be able to tell them when to get on and off the bus and can guide them every step of the way to their destination. If the user goes the wrong way, an alert will be sent to the client contact centre, which can then look after that person. These are things we are working on.
We are implementing another project that involves equipping the 227 crossroads in Laval with a smart system that recognizes when a bus is arriving. We will then be able, for example, to give priority to a bus that is late by shortening the duration of a red light and increasing the duration of a green light. In a conflict between two buses, the one that is later and has more passengers on board—we know the number of passengers on board all of our buses at all times—will get the priority. Those things have already been done.
I will not go through all the points on the following slide. They deal with smarter methods of payment, such as credit cards, the development of on-demand transportation, and making full use of big data. But I will draw your attention to the second point.
The future challenge faced by transportation companies is to integrate sustainable mobility solutions. The hotel industry has been shaken up by sharing solutions such as Airbnb, and the taxi industry by Uber. In the music industry, people wanting to sell music and records have been shaken up by solutions like Spotify. Which sharing models will come along to shake up the public transit industry?
The Finns have an interesting concept called Mobility as a Service, or MaaS. The concept not only includes methods of payment, but also car-sharing, carpooling, public transport, and bike-sharing. If we want to avoid a kind of chaos, we will have to have legislation on this. I do not know if that legislation will be federal, provincial or municipal, but legislation there will have to be. We need a new mindset. Public institutions must become aware of the data and the various players, in order to come up with integrated solutions for transportation in our cities that are as optimal as we can make them—