Two years ago, the city of Gronau in the Münsterland region completely switched its scheduled bus service to a tariff-integrated DRT concept. Since then, the so-called G(ronau)-Mobil has been operating 130 stops flexibly and after pre-booking, significantly more than its predecessor “StadtBus” (“city bus”). But how do the services catch on with the population and shouldn’t DRT services complement existing scheduled services, not replace them? We asked one of the facilitators of the G-Mobil: Dennis Schöne, who works in the traffic management of Regionalverkehr Münsterland GmbH, the service’s operator.

Since December 2021, EMMI-MOBIL has been driving with two electric minibuses through the municipal area of Bad Hindelang. By doing the service is supplementing the existing public transport service as an on-demand service in order to offer an attractive flexible and free-of-charge mobility solution, especially for the guests of the Allgäu holiday region. A good reason for ioki insights to ask Maximilian Hillmeier, tourism director of Bad Hindelang, how demand-responsive mobility can be successfully established as part of a sustainable tourism strategy and how the future of mobility in holiday regions can look like.

As Senior Expert Shared Automated Mobility at ioki, Tanja Wiesenthal is already working today on the future of tomorrow. ioki has been one of the pioneers of autonomous driving in public transport since the beginning and covers all the necessary processes for driverless public transport, from app development and the algorithm for ridepooling to operational platform op-eration. Tanja Wiesenthal worked for SAP before and has been working for ioki since 2020, where she is responsible for the procedural and technical conception of ridepooling with au-tonomous vehicles at ioki.

Since the beginning of 2023, PostBus Ltd* has been offering its employees in Berne demand responsive employee transport. It’s about time for ioki insights to take a look at how sustainable and sensible mobility for employees can look in Switzerland. Fabian Heil, Head of Market Launch at PostBus, was available to talk to us.

Three years ago, Dr Olga Nevska, CEO Telekom Mobility Solutions, was interviewed in our blog series “PERSPECTIVES from …”. At that time, we talked about the challenges of organising company mobility solutions, but also about employee mobility at Telekom and the then new on-demand service with ioki software.

Since 2020, a lot has happened in the area of mobility and work. That’s why ioki insights asked again. This time, it’s all about the changes in employee mobility since the pandemic, the trends in corporate mobility and how demand responsive services are being received by employees.

As Head of Sales International and Business Development, Laura Reupke is responsible for the international business development of ioki. With her extensive experience in the transport and digitalisation sector, she is developing customer-oriented solutions for a needs-based transport transition in Europe together with her international team.

Since 2015, a dial a ride service (call-collective-taxi or in German Anruf-Sammel-Taxi, AST) has supplemented public transport in Limburg, Hesse. In 2021, the AST was digitalised by an on-demand service called LahnStar. ioki insights spoke to Michael Stanke, first councillor of the city of Limburg and operations manager of the Limburg city line, and Hicham Azzou, head of the public transport department, about the development of the AST into on-demand mobility. The LahnStar is part of the OnDeMo project of the Rhein-Main-Verkehrsbund (RMV).   

Since 2021 the urban railway, called S-Bahn in German, in Stuttgart relies on a flexible rail replacement bus system operating on demand whenever modernisation work is undertaken on the main line. This is possible with on demand software powered and developed by ioki. ioki insights talked to Dr. Dirk Rothenstein, who is the chairman of the S-Bahn Stuttgart management board, about modernising the rail infrastructure, multimodal mobility in the city and the rail replacement services on demand.