A popular competition throughout the Grand Est region

The 'Au Boulot à Vélo' challenge, created and organized by CADR67 since 2009 in partnership with the Eurometropolis of Strasbourg, is a festive event aimed at promoting the use of bicycles for commuting and professional journeys.

1. Context

The principle of the challenge is simple: Each company can register its employees and divide them into departments. Employees are encouraged to commute to work by bicycle. At the end of the competition, a ranking of companies whose employees have covered the most cumulative kilometers is published.

As part of the increasing popularity of the 'Au Boulot à Vélo' challenge, the Eurometropolis of Strasbourg has decided to revamp the competition to make it more accessible, intuitive, and enjoyable. This major evolution aims to make this event a true reference and an example to follow in terms of ecology for all major cities in France.

2. Our Solution

The 'Au Boulot à Vélo' application was initially designed to be a 'companion' application. Its primary goal was to provide additional support to the already available web version, allowing companies to register, create departments within the company, grant access to employees, enable employees to input their traveled kilometers, and check routes and rankings.

Limiting cheating possibilities became a significant objective as cheating started to occur, as is the case in any competition. The application's main goal was to limit cheating possibilities by tracking the routes taken by participants. The result is an application that uses real-time GPS data from the phone to track journeys and calculate exact distances.

But that's not all. Implementing such a system offered new opportunities for cheating. Some participants began using the tracking system even for journeys made by car or public transport. We quickly identified this behavior and used temporal data in addition to GPS data to determine the speed of movement and ensure that users traveling at abnormal speeds were filtered out.

Operation Under High Load

Creating an application designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously is a challenge in itself. The application's concept had an inherent specificity from the start: most home-to-work and work-to-home journeys take place in the morning (between 6:00 and 9:00) and in the evening (between 16:00 and 19:00). Peak hours became a challenge not only for public transport and roads but also for our application, which had to be ready to handle tens of thousands of simultaneous connections. In total, 17,000 users recorded their daily journeys, the vast majority during peak hours.

Creating a Simple and Intuitive Experience

One of the goals of the 'Au Boulot à Vélo' application is to provide a simple and intuitive experience to make its use natural and enjoyable for users of all ages, from 18 to 70 years old. To achieve this, we developed the application using Flutter technology, a technology endorsed by Google, for unmatched smoothness and security.

The Results

'Au Boulot à Vélo' has been an unparalleled success, with the following results in 2023:

• 860 registered establishments (22% more than in 2022)
• 17,000 cyclists (21% more than in 2022)
• A total of 2,000,000 kilometers traveled (25% more than in 2022).

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