Mobility Summit 2025: the empty seat is the whole problem

A fleet that is 60% full is not a 40% saving away

The instinct when occupancy is low is to cut vehicles. It rarely works, because the empty seats are not evenly spread — they sit on specific routes, at specific times, for specific sites. Remove a vehicle and you usually break the one run that was full.

What changes the number is planning against demand rather than against last year’s plan. That means knowing who actually boards, where, and when — at the stop level, not the contract level.

You cannot cut your way to a full bus. You can only plan your way there.

What a week of replanning looks like

We walked the room through an ordinary week on a real operation: boardings come in daily, the engine reproposes stops and departure times, and the operations team approves or overrides. Nothing about it is dramatic. That is the point — it is a routine, not a project.

• Daily — Boardings, no-shows and delays land automatically from the driver and passenger apps.
• Weekly — The engine proposes a revised plan. Most weeks it is a handful of stop and time changes, not a redesign.
• Monthly — Cost per employee and per site goes to the customer, alongside occupancy. The two numbers only mean something together.

A second session, and the honest version of it

Later the same day we took a second stage, on where corporate transport demand in Türkiye is actually heading. Our contribution ended up being mostly a caution: a shuttle programme cuts emissions when it replaces private cars, and does very little when it merely runs alongside them.

Occupancy is the number that tells you which of the two you have. Which puts the emissions conversation in exactly the same place as the cost conversation — not a symmetry we planned, but the most useful thing either session produced.