Twenty-eight villages, two hundred and thirty-four square kilometres, two vehicles
Rural Lombardy has the demand problem in its purest form: real need, spread so thin that no timetable can serve it economically. Two on-demand vehicles now carry 350 passengers a week.
- Setting
- Rural district, 234 km²
- Service model
- On-demand transport
- Operator
- Autoguidovie
- Hours
- 07:00–19:00, Mon–Sat
Results
Five times the passengers of the scheduled service it replaced.
Across 130 km² covering Stradella town and the surrounding villages.
Two on weekdays proved enough for the whole area; two more were added on Saturdays.
The challenge
Real demand, spread too thin for any timetable
Twenty-eight villages are scattered across 234 square kilometres. Each generates a handful of trips a day — to the market town, the health centre, the station. Added together the demand is substantial; village by village it is far too small to justify a scheduled route.
Public transport ran on a radial system into Stradella town. Fine if you lived on the route or wanted the town; a trip between two adjacent villages meant a bus in, a wait, a bus out, and the same again coming home — most of a day and four fares. Services were infrequent, so most rural residents drove; those without a car had nothing.
What we deployed
One flexible service instead of twenty-eight impossible routes
- 01District-wide zone
One service area spanning all 28 villages rather than fixed inter-village routes.
- 02MioBus, white label
A passenger app under the operator’s own name, plus the Driver App and Central Control Console.
- 03Scheduled rides first
Distances are long, so riders book ahead; the algorithms were tuned to hold pickup times strictly.
- 04Digital driver guidance
Optimal routes between villages no longer depend on a driver knowing every lane.
The district became one service area
Rather than a route per village, the whole district is a single zone with 249 virtual stops. Requests are pooled across settlements, so two vehicles cover a territory that would need a dozen scheduled lines. It was Shotl’s largest service area to date; Autoguidovie has since set up five similar services on the same platform.
How the assignment rules workOn site
MioBus — the operator’s own app, built on Shotl. 
Autoguidovie minibuses work 249 virtual stops across the district. 
Between villages, the tablet knows the lanes so the driver does not have to.
Monica MarconiHead of On-demand Services, Autoguidovie“This service works well precisely because people have the freedom to choose between different times and points — so the route we offer is much closer to the one they actually want.”
“When there was only a scheduled service here there were very few passengers, probably because the route was so constrained: people could only go from their starting point to one specific destination, with few times or pick-up points to choose from.”
Similar challenges
One platform, two very different service shapes
The Oltrepò Pavese service connects the towns of Stradella and Varzi with the surrounding municipalities — interurban, by day. The same operator, Autoguidovie, runs a flexible night service in Pavia on the same platform. What matters is fitting the service area to the kind of service required, not the other way round.
The conditions travel: villages scattered across a wide district, a radial network that carried almost nobody between them, and residents who otherwise drive or stay home. Young and elderly residents now reach essential services without relying on others, and a generation is learning it is possible to live in an outlying village without owning a car.
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