Supercharging Apps with Mobility on Demand-The Case of Brightline Trains

Covid wreaked havoc on our global transportation ecosystem so much so that at one point, the Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, famously stated:

“You should avoid public transport if at all possibleSo work from home if you can.”

While transportation patterns may have changed substantially due to behavioral change brought on by the pandemic, it is clear that in many cities and regions around the world, public transit, rail and other forms of mobility are on the rise again.  Many people who could heed Johnson’s words and did work from home during the pandemic, are desperate to get back to the office and interact with their colleagues, while in some cases companies are mandating a return to work.

Now that mobility is returning to some form of constant in people’s lives, how will users and the ecosystem respond and engage with the new opportunities the growing demand creates?  At Iomob, we believe transport, organizations need to offer a seamless, borderless and interoperable mobility experiences to their thousands or millions of users by super charging their apps with complimentary mobility services.

To make this happen, Iomob has invested in building a modern and globally scalable digital platform for supporting the integration of mobility services with  a proprietary and configurable journey planner capable of connecting any mode of mobility to other modes for seamless door to door journeys.  The latest version of this technology, and a great case in point of our vision of supercharging the apps of our clients, is Brightline Trains.

For those of you who don’t know, Brightline is one of the most innovative, private, high speed rail operators in the world.  And, perhaps surprisingly, they are based in the US, a country that has generally been behind in embracing public transit and high-speed rail.  

Brightline has an ambitious goal of accelerating the low carbon economy and growing rail demand by providing door to door mobility for rail passengers. The idea, which we embrace at Iomob, is that the user experience of taking rail should be as good or better than taking your own car. If you can travel door to door seamlessly, read, take a nap, or get some work done with high speed Wi-Fi, then you will be more likely to choose rail over your car.

We are honored that Brightline selected Iomob out of a global review of multimodal providers to provide this experience.  Our key differentiator?  They preferred an SDK that could be easily and quickly integrated into their own smartphone application as part of their post-covid relaunch.

The screenshot of Iomob’s journey planner results configured for the Brightline app helps users to discover, route, book and pay for a range of public, private and shared services in a combined door to door journey plan. They can better understand the cost and legs of the journey as well as complete the whole booking and payment of those services within Brightline´s own app with one payment.   The journey planner even allows a user to factor their own car into a multimodal journey, making parking adjacent to the station an endpoint of their first mile, as first in the world.  

Another exciting part of this partnership has been collaborating with Via, the world´s largest bus on demand/DRT service. Brightline is offering free shuttles and subsidised taxis for journeys starting or ending within a radius of their stations.   

The Brightline case study is but one example of how multimodal mobility can supercharge an enterprise app, in this case a new app being released to time with their relaunch of rail service post covid. Iomob is working with other clients, such as Skanetrafiken in Sweden to supercharge an existing public transit app  and in  the coming months, we will do the same for more rail clients plus other verticals including parking operators, airlines and a last mile delivery companies operator, among others.