Company description

The STM is Quebec’s fourteenth-largest company, handling some 1.2 million trips a day. It employs over 9,000 people, more than half of whom work directly with customers. A key player in the passenger ground transportation sector, the STM provides more than 80% of public transit trips in the Montreal region, and more than 70% of all trips in Quebec. To support public transit ridership, the company owns, manages and develops bus and metro service on the island of Montreal. It also provides adapted transportation for people with functional limitations, using minibuses and cab services. It also offers a public cab service in certain sparsely populated areas, in order to develop demand for future bus service.

Issues

The Société de transport de Montréal‘s research team wanted to know what waiting time would be acceptable for metro users. The challenge was twofold: to measure a notion as intangible as time, and to reach users during their journey without delaying them.

Solution

The Fino team developed a mobile application that asked users to enter a few key pieces of information during each of their journeys over the course of a week. Fun to use, the application enabled users to collect information even when the cellular network was not accessible. What’s more, the application was connected to the Ma voix ma STM panel. The data collected was encrypted in transit and hosted on a dedicated STM server to ensure security.

Results

Over 2,000 users were recruited, and information on over 6,000 trips was captured using the Fino application.