On the Volt Lines blog we write about corporate employee transport, smart shuttle software and fleet operations: product updates, engineering notes, company news and guides for HR teams.
Scaling corporate transportation sounds simple from the outside: add vehicles, win customers, and serve more routes. In practice, it means learning how to grow without letting service quality, cost control, or decision-making discipline slip.
You only find out how far an interface fix reaches once people stop talking about it. Every product has screens nobody gets excited about. The address entry screen is one of them.
Corporate account onboarding does not begin on launch day, and it does not end there. The first 90 days often show whether a new corporate mobility account is developing a stable partnership or still requires constant intervention.
Rebuilding a working system from scratch is the one thing every experienced engineer will tell you not to do, and for most teams they are right. It was right for us on the code alone. What made us do it anyway was a data model that could not describe the customers we wanted.
Every product team talks about its roadmap. The decisions that shaped our product most are the other ones: the features we looked at seriously and decided not to build. That list is shorter than the roadmap, and it explains the product better.
See how commute experience affects employee retention in Turkey, the UK, and the US, using real survey data, traffic index figures, and cost statistics.
Choosing the right employee shuttle provider can make a big difference — boosting operational efficiency while cutting costs and improving employee satisfaction.
Your employees' comfort and motivation have a direct effect on their performance at work. By offering them the best possible transport, you can make a real difference to their working lives.
On our journey to fill the empty seats on the road and bring our carbon emissions to zero by 2030, we applied to TÜBİTAK 1507 to strengthen our technology muscle — and we were awarded the grant.
Volt Lines Acquired by Global Tech-Enabled Transit Leader Swvl. Istanbul, Turkey, Tuesday, 26 April 2022 It is with great excitement that we, the Volt Lines team, announce our acquisition by Swvl Holdings Corp, a global leader in tech-enabled mass transit solutions. This remarkable milestone marks a pivotal moment in our journey to redefine urban mobility
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Volt Lines saw 90% of its operations come to a halt overnight and its revenue drop by 64%.
Volt Lines announced the successful closing of its carve-out round, with a 30% oversubscription versus the fundraising target.
Volt Lines management is taking back control from Swvl İSTANBUL, Thursday, January 26, 2023 Volt Lines announced today that its management team will be taking back control of the company and reversing the Swvl acquisition which was announced in April last year. Ali Halabi, the founder of Volt Lines will continue to lead the company as its CEO. On April
How we brought artificial intelligence and optimisation into our routing decisions — the microservice behind it, and the algorithms it runs.
A founder's breakdown of what makes a great employee stock option plan, and why we believe Volt Lines offers the best ESOP policy in Turkey.
Not a Preference but a Necessity: Flexible Transport Solutions During the Pandemic. Since the first COVID-19 case in Turkey was announced on 11 March, a great deal in our lives is no longer what it was. The way we step outside is different; going out without a mask on our face and disinfectant or cologne in our hand is now unthinkable. The way we greet our closest friends is different — those familiar handshakes and hugs are gone. And of course
Although the pace of technological, financial and cultural development in Istanbul, one of the world's largest metropolises, brings employment to more people every day, millions of people travelling from home to work every morning and from work to home every evening is turning traffic — one of Istanbulites' biggest problems — into something intractable. The traffic problem, which even the public transport system cannot absorb,
Hi 🙂 I have been working as a Product Designer at Volt Lines for a little over four months. I set out on this path with a decision to change career that I took last year (in March 2018), and late in November this year I took my first step into my new career at Volt Lines! Even in the short time since, what I have learned from my Volt Lines experience is genuinely enormous and priceless to me!
What Is the Volt Lines Driver Protection Program? While following the Covid-19 outbreak that emerged in late 2019 from day one, we began working on the measures we would take should the pandemic reach Turkey. When the first case appeared in Turkey in mid-March, we put those measures into effect immediately. We applied our hygiene and safety practices — vehicle disinfection, driver training, mask requirements — without exception
There are certain standards set by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality with the aim of providing a modern and safe service to everyone who uses public transport in Istanbul. Alongside public transport vehicles, companies providing employee shuttle and transportation services must also comply with these standards. Obtaining the road permit — also known as the yol kağıdı — is one of these standards set by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.
I am writing this on the way back from Hamburg to Istanbul, at 10,668 metres, and I want to share my excitement and thoughts on a couple of things. The first is that we crossed $1.1 million in annual revenue at the end of October, six months after we started serving our first corporate customer. The second is realising just how far ahead our technology is, after attending one of Germany's best mobility summits
Occupational health and safety, a subject that grows more important by the day in the interests of company employees' safety and the prevention of accidents at work, has at the same time become a profession in which employment is steadily rising. At a time when more people want to work as an occupational health and safety specialist every year, anyone interested in this profession needs to obtain an occupational health and safety certificate.
Istanbul traffic has a negative effect on most people living in this city, and especially on employees who spend hours on the road getting from home to work and from work to home. That is why, to make the city liveable, measures that will solve the traffic problem need to be taken first. Foremost among those measures is running public transport vehicles and shuttle vehicles in an orderly, systematic way.
The Workers' Health and Occupational Safety Regulation sets out the health conditions that must exist in the places where employees work. Alongside this, the Regulation also sets out the measures and equipment needed to prevent health problems that may arise from the tools, machinery and raw materials used in the workplace, together with the equipment that must be present in the workplace and the safety measures to be taken in order to prevent accidents at work.
The document that companies providing transportation services such as employee shuttles and school shuttles obtain from the metropolitan municipality is called a route permit. Companies in the tourism sector must also obtain a route permit. Operating a transport service without a road permit brings penalties with it. Until now the route permit was obtained by applying to the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in person; as of 2019 it can be obtained by online application.
İSG-KATİP is a piece of software brought into service in 2012 by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security following the entry into force of Occupational Health and Safety Act no. 6331. The İSG-KATİP software works in integration with the 2019 e-Government system. The İSG-KATİP system allows the employment of occupational safety specialists, workplace physicians and other health
People working in Istanbul, one of the world's largest metropolises, spend hours in traffic every day. Those hours come back to employees as stress and lost productivity. That is why, for many employees, working somewhere that provides an employee shuttle service is now a priority when choosing a job. Volt Lines, which brings the employee shuttle service together with a strong operational arm and innovative technology
Vehicle tracking systems, which let you monitor your vehicles in real time, are sold by different companies on different terms. Before deciding which company to work with, you need to establish what you need. What should you look out for before signing with a vehicle tracking company? Here are some questions you should ask before signing with a company: Does it cover the whole country, or are there blind spots? Does the company providing the vehicle tracking system
UKOME, a name frequently heard by anyone working in sectors touching on transport, traffic and public transportation, denotes the powers of Metropolitan Municipalities to take decisions, plan and coordinate on traffic and transport matters in the areas falling within their remit, responsibility and jurisdiction. These powers were granted to Metropolitan Municipalities by Law no. 5216. What Does UKOME Mean? UKOME stands for Transport Coordination Centre. A unit within Metropolitan Municipalities
TUHİM, one of the operating arms of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, is the abbreviation for the Public Transport Services Directorate. As the name suggests, TUHİM is charged with establishing safe, comfortable, environmentally friendly and economical public transport systems and with encouraging the public to use public transport. Some of the duties within TUHİM's remit inside the boundaries of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality are as follows: Establishing, commissioning, operating or arranging the operation of the facilities needed for public transport, in coordination with the relevant
VAT — Value Added Tax — is a consumption tax. The end consumer who buys the goods or the service is the party that actually bears the VAT. The tax is paid when buying both products and services. The VAT rate on shuttle transportation is the type of value added tax that applies to anyone purchasing an employee shuttle service or a school shuttle service. The other goods and services on which value added tax
The Shuttle Transportation Card must be obtained from the Public Transport Services Directorate by all individuals and legal entities that will provide student and employee shuttle transportation services across Istanbul. The Shuttle Transportation Card is issued only in the name of individuals and legal entities that own vehicles registered in the province of Istanbul. To apply for a Shuttle Transportation Card you must first hold a "Shuttle Transportation Authorisation Certificate".
Vehicle tracking systems run on GPS: the mobile data devices fitted to vehicles pass the information they receive from GPS satellites to a data centre over the GSM/GPRS network. In other words, vehicles are monitored via satellite systems and all recorded information is sent to a database. Through dedicated vehicle tracking software, users can monitor this information in real time or look back at historical data. For satellites to track a vehicle
Hello! I'm Burcu, and I am the Product Manager at Volt Lines. I hope you are having a good week and a good day, and that everything is running smoothly. Let me get straight to it: as the Product and Technology arms of Volt Lines, we thought about how we could share our experiences, what we have learned and our general mood in a way that might be useful to communities in Turkey and around the world, and we decided to write regular blog posts.
Vehicles used in public transport and shuttle transportation must meet certain standards. These standards are set first and foremost to ensure the safety of the passengers being carried, and then to ensure that every process relating to road transport runs completely and in good order. The age limit for employee shuttle vehicles is one of the subjects debated recently and settled after review. To find the answers to your questions about the shuttle age
Traffic is one of the foremost problems facing Istanbul, one of the largest metropolises in Turkey and indeed the world. According to research carried out in May 2019, 11.8 million journeys are made each day in Istanbul road transport, and shuttle vehicles account for 24 per cent of that figure. Among the leading measures introduced to eliminate problems such as unlicensed operators in shuttle transportation, to enforce safety precautions and to ensure certain
OHS is the set of measures that must be taken to create a safe working environment in order to prevent accidents at work. As industrialisation has accelerated and technology has developed, the measures that must be taken regarding the safety of the people working in a workplace have grown, and the importance of occupational safety — necessary to make workplaces a safe environment — has risen in direct proportion.
We wrote this post to explain how the digital products we use every day at Volt Lines help us with our growth-related needs.
What is withholding? How is it calculated? Before turning to VAT withholding in employee transportation, it is worth understanding what withholding actually is. According to the Turkish Language Association, "tevkifat" means deductions in matters of money. It refers to apportioning and deducting on taxes. Withholding is where, instead of collecting the VAT it is owed from the seller alone, the state apportions it between buyer and seller and collects from both
A vehicle tracking system lets you monitor your vehicle or fleet in real time. Favoured particularly by organisations and companies operating more than one vehicle, a vehicle tracking system allows vehicles to be monitored and managed 24/7 via GPS satellites from an internet-connected computer, smartphone or tablet. The technology used to establish a vehicle's position is the Global Positioning System
Car rental, haulage and transportation companies make widespread use of vehicle tracking devices. Installing the system can vary according to the type and model of the vehicle. Users do not really need to follow the technical detail of the installation, because the companies providing the service carry it out. Where is a vehicle tracking system fitted? When the device is installed, a spot is chosen that cannot be seen directly and is hard to reach
If the first thing that comes to mind at the mention of Istanbul is the city's beauty, the second is its traffic. Today millions of people working in Istanbul travel between two continents simply to get to work and back. The same is true of students who spend hours getting to school. As school shuttles join the traffic, the hours people working in Istanbul spend on the road keep rising.
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