Creating a Real-Time, Direct Channel with Riders for Enhanced Service

The Challenge

Serving 600,000 citizens and 3.5 million tourists annually, Azienda Trasporti Area Fiorentina, or ATAF, is the primary transit operator for Florence, Italy.  In its digitalization process, ATAF wanted to improve the transit experience and replace its current application with a more interactive app for better user experience for both citizens and tourists. 

With only social media and their website as communication channels, the biggest hurdle for ATAF was communicating all the different changes to their riders, especially with the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic which severely disrupted daily life, and in extension, public transportation in the city.

The Solution

ATAF turned to Moovit to develop a white label application to replace its predecessor, ATAF 2.0. One of the main reasons for ATAF selecting Moovit’s white-label application was the ability to communicate with their riders through the app’s push and in-app notifications and obtain better, more reliable data on passengers’ travel patterns and behaviors. 

Even as the application was launched right before Italy’s strict COVID-19-related lockdown went into effect, essential workers still relied on public transit to get to their jobs, and ATAF was able to easily communicate the various closings and changes through the app. 

As the lockdown in the region began easing up, ATAF promoted surveys through the app to gain information from their current riders. “Our goals for the number of survey responses were more easily and quickly achieved than they had ever imagined,” said Neri Cambi, Operations Assistant at ATAF.

Reasons for Choosing Moovit:

• Ability to offer real-time arrival information and step-by-step directions
• Ability to communicate instantly and easily with riders through in-app and push notifications
• Extensive accessibility features that allow everyone to use the app
• Short time to market with the area already well-mapped by Moovit
• Urban mobility analytical capabilities

Results

Within weeks of the white label application launch, the new ATAF app became the primary and most important communication channel with riders, far surpassing their reach from their website and social media users. Thanks to the ability to send push notifications through the ATAF app, the team sent surveys to their new app users. ATAF was consistently surprised by the overwhelming responses they received for their surveys. 

“One survey we sent through the app garnered 25% more responses in a single day than we had expected for that whole week,” said Sara Braccini, Operations Assistant at ATAF. Another survey received 10 times the number of responses they expected in a single day.

About Azienda Trasporti Area Fiorentina (ATAF)

ATAF has been providing public transportation in Florence, Italy since 1946. Its 41 bus routes include 1,125 stops that are covered by more than 350 buses that serve 600,000 inhabitants as well as 3.5 million annual visitors. The routes traverse from the North at Vaglia to the South at Impruneta, and from the West at Signa to the East at Fiesole.