Salon des Maires 2023 local authority exhibition in Paris

Keolis signs three partnerships underlining its social and societal commitment in local regions
20th November 2023

▪ At the Salon des Maires 2023 exhibition for mayors and local authorities in Paris, Keolis signed a partnership with UMAY to promote its public app designed to help people stay safe when travelling, especially on public transport.

▪ Keolis also signed a partnership with France's Community Service and Professional Integration Agency (ATIGIP), part of the justice ministry, to develop and diversify the deployment of community service within the group's French subsidiaries.

▪ Keolis and PIMMS Médiation also renewed their agreement for 2024–2026. A founder member involved in this mediation organisation for 25 years, Keolis is re-emphasising its commitment to inclusive mobility and social integration.

Strengthening safety on public transport

The UMAY app was developed to overcome concerns about safety and harassment in the street. The app, which already has 45,000 downloads in France and the UK, enables users to share an itinerary in real time and locate safe places nearby from a list of 6,000 in France. The app has an emergency button that immediately alerts trusted people if the user feels unsafe or experiences aggression or violence.

Keolis has made a commitment to promote the app to its subsidiaries so that they can:

• list their sales offices as safe places, together with other partner locations and public transport venues. This includes training for relevant staff in how to welcome, reassure and inform victims, labelling of locations and regular audits to ensure the commitments are being respected;

• benefit from anonymised report data, providing a safety barometer and enabling them to adjust their internal processes or their partners’ procedures relating to safety and crime prevention.

This partnership reinforces Keolis’s initiatives to promote safety and combat sexist intimidation and sexual assault on public transport on behalf of transport authorities. Already active in this field, Keolis designs awareness and prevention campaigns targeting the public, implements exploratory initiatives, enables passengers to ask to leave the bus between regular stops, provides safe places (with the “Ask for Angela” label in Bordeaux, Lille and Besançon, for example) and offers online reporting solutions for victims (Lyon and Bordeaux).

Promoting professional integration through community service

The newly signed agreement between Keolis and the French justice ministry aims to promote

community service sentences and to accept more of these workers within the group's subsidiaries in France.

This partnership with the ATIGIP includes several initiatives: putting the agency’s local representatives in touch with dedicated contacts in the Keolis networks, circulating suggested job descriptions to all the subsidiaries and organising regular discussions and shared monitoring.

The partnership enriches Keolis’s work to prevent delinquency by reducing repeat offences and deepens its local roots by strengthening the commitment to professional integration within the group and its subsidiaries.

In 2022, five Keolis subsidiaries in Lille, Lyon, Rennes, Tours and Dijon were already involved in this type of approach, regularly accepting community service workers who provided nearly 10,000 hours of work in total.

Offering increasingly inclusive mobility

PIMMS Médiation creates links between populations and public services, supporting residents in their applications for essential services such as telephone contracts and helping them understand their rights when it comes to travel passes.

PIMMS Médiation also operates within transport networks, answering users’ questions, guiding passengers and guaranteeing a human presence. In practical terms, PIMMS Médiation’s mediators help to facilitate travel on Keolis’s networks in several ways:

• with mediation actions reinforcing peace of mind and the feeling of safety on public transport;

• by offering help with learning how to use the transport networks, buying appropriate tickets and understanding how to validate them;

• through support for people with reduced mobility throughout their journeys;

• in the management of passenger flows at peak times and during major sporting or cultural events.

Thanks to this partnership, 3,000 people were given support through reception spaces in 2022 and 800,000 mediations took place. The partnership strengthens Keolis's commitment to its public service mission by facilitating citizens’ access to everyday services and processes.