CTM InfoTrafic, LilleRéseau or even MEL Transport Users. Each of these three accounts is followed by more than a thousand people who use buses, trams and metros every day in the Lille metropolis. All are volunteers and driven by the same motivation: to be useful… and to better inform others.
They are not affiliated with Ilévia, MEL, any other company or institution. They are users, like you and us, who take the bus, tram or metro every day to go to the evening, to university or to work. But they don’t just borrow them: they like to talk to bus drivers, find out what is causing a breakdown, or a delay, an accident… And they share their knowledge with others.
Like the young people behind Lille Réseau, for example, who are all between 15 and 25 years old. They organize themselves in pairs to go on the ground to make “rounds”, to create contacts with the bus drivers, to go there to observe a deviation. “We are passionate, summarizes Ryan, 21, the new manager of the account. We want to help other users because we find that Ilévia does not communicate enough. ” It is for this reason that the account was created in 2019 by Dylan, another 16-year-old at the time.
“We are a little less than twenty today and there is always a team available to go on the field and communicate on Twitter.“They also have a Discord and try to be as responsive and detailed as possible on their tweets.
More info
Having access to more info on the network is also what prompted Kyllian to launch CTM Info Trafic, another information relay account. “I started in January 2019, when there was a whole bunch of disturbances with the snow, he explains. It worked well at that time because Ilévia was not very responsive. And then I just continued.”Remember, that was also the moment when Transpole became Ilévia with a network overhaul.
The young man was then a student and has since forged many links with drivers and other employees. CTM has become a group over time and there are now three of them managing the Twitter account. “We are not here to replace Ilévia: we are there as a complement because we simply want to help people. We are not necessarily faster but we will really take the time to respond to users personally.”
In addition to his contacts in the field, Kyllian is also familiar with the operation of the Ilévia application and also pays close attention to the veracity of each piece of information disseminated. “We may be a volunteer, but we try to be as professional as possible. If we are not sure of an information, we prefer to say nothing and take the time to check.”
Identify the real expectations
All of this necessarily takes time. At User.es Transports MEL for example, Fabien, 32, estimates that he spends around 1 hour per day on average for this collective that he founded four and a half years ago. “This was following a further increase in Transpole’s tariffs [ex-Ilévia], we were then mobilized and we have continued to raise the requests of users since.”
To date, there are still a dozen or so to be active, whether it is to create visuals, graphics or manage the Facebook group and the Twitter account. Here, traffic information is sometimes relayed but this is not the heart of the account news: the collective is mainly there to talk about network quality of service or follow up on important issues like the doubling of metro trains. “What we also want is to bring back to Ilévia and the MEL the real expectations of users.”
On Twitter, it’s Antoine, a 21-year-old student, who is most often at the helm. He joined the collective in 2019 after a series of struggles in public transport. Its primary motivation is to make itself useful but also to act on its own scale. “What we want is to make things happen to give the Lille metropolitan area a quality, accessible transport network for all..”
It goes through their analyzes and files but also through cyber actions with online petitions or compilations of testimonials that the collective sends directly to those responsible. The Lille student also takes advantage of his trips in the transport he takes every day to answer people or tweet the important information of the day.
For all these volunteers, getting into action is a way of making oneself useful, of helping but also of not remaining inactive in the face of everyday situations that they consider to be perfectible.
To find these accounts on Twitter:
– Transpole MEL users
– CTM Traffic Info
– Lille Network
We remind you that these people are volunteers and that these accounts are not affiliated with Ilévia or the MEL.
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