Image: The Milla Pods.
The RATP is experimenting with autonomous shuttles in peri-urban and rural areas to connect over two kilometers the RER station of Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse (Yvelines) and the parking lot of the neighboring town of Coubertin.
The goal? “Desaturate the parking lot of the RER station”, indicates the group in a press release. This alternative solution is offered to users who take this route every day, from the station to their car, to reach their home in the Paris region. Reducing the use of the individual car by mobilizing a multimodal reflection: this device participates in the concept of Mobility-as-a-service (MaaS), which consists in gathering centralized and real-time information at the scale of a territory on various means of transport.
In the long term, the RATP group imagines including this offer in a bouquet of solutions proposed by the communities and Ile-de-France-Mobility, the bus, the bicycle, and even carpooling.
RER, shuttle and private car
For the hardware part, the Milla group is currently supplying two Milla Pods shuttles. They are entirely electric and autonomous, and can transport four people, accompanied by a safety operator.
This service operates on weekdays during office hours, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., depending on reservations made by travelers via a dedicated application. The shuttles can run “every four to five minutes on average”, specifies the RATP. The operator expects to welcome nearly 10,000 travelers during the experimental phase.
An Autonomous Vehicle Command Post (PCVA) from 12e arrondissement of Paris supervises the remote experimentation, while the cities of Chevreuse and Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, directly concerned, will be responsible for collecting feedback from travelers and sharing data with research institutes and the RATP.
This is the second experiment carried out by the RATP after the autonomous Vincennes shuttles which have been operating every weekend since March 2021. A third experiment, called “Rive Gauche”, is also in the pipeline. It should be launched at the end of the year, or even the beginning of next year, this time in an urban area where traffic is very dense.