New HR Summit 2025: 3.6 Years of Your Working Life Are Spent on the Road
At New HR Summit 2025, hosted at Wyndham Grand Istanbul Levent, Volt Lines founder and CEO Ali Halabi and COO Özgün Şahin took the stage with a session called "Smart Journeys: Employee Happiness and Sustainability through Digital Transformation." The number that stayed with the room was this one: across a full working life, the average employee spends roughly 3.6 years commuting. That is not a logistics statistic. It is an employee experience statistic.
The capacity nobody is counting
The conversation started with what is already on the road. Istanbul runs more than 50,000 shuttle vehicles making over 150,000 trips a day, carrying more than a million passengers. The inefficiency rate across that system sits at 31%. The environmental cost is easier to picture than to accept: annual emissions equivalent to five times the Belgrade Forest. The problem is not a shortage of vehicles. It is empty seats.
What companies are actually struggling with
Irregular routes, inefficient operations, shuttles that do not arrive on time, no reporting or transparency, and a communication gap between the provider and the employee. Inefficient operations hit the budget. Late shuttles hit productivity. The office experience does not begin at the front door, it begins on the shuttle, and most companies have no visibility into that first hour of the day.
Where the market is heading
Özgün Şahin shared what the team is seeing across Turkey. Layoffs and downsizing are up. The four-day week is on the agenda. Four to eight week remote work windows are being piloted over the summer. Return to office is rising and hybrid is in decline. And in parallel with all of it, offering commuting as an employee benefit is climbing fast. When people are being asked back into the office, how they get there stops being a side question.
The Volt Lines numbers
Volt Lines shared its own Istanbul figures on stage: 6,800 active passengers, 662 active drivers, 449 active routes, and more than 7 million completed trips, closing in on 8 million. The company has raised $14 million since 2018 and has now started operations in Izmir. Across roughly 6,000 companies in the CRM, the pattern is consistent: the same headcount moved with fewer vehicles, less budget and lower emissions. Pilots deliver at least 10% savings. Through the Marketplace, where a company shares a route with another company in the same building, cost efficiency can reach 30%.
What comes next
Electric vehicles are the next step, with a longer term move toward autonomous. But the thesis has not changed since 2018: fewer empty seats, fewer inefficient vehicles, and the time saved handed back to the employee.
Want to see what these numbers look like for your own routes? Get in touch and we will walk you through it.
Let's review your shuttle operation together
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