Modal Commute League
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Week 36 · Season 2026/27

The commute is the match. Your colleagues are the league.

Modal turns the trip to work into a weekly game between colleagues. The phone recognises how you travelled, the league does the rest. Your employer sees points and totals. Never places.

Play a demo week What leaves your phone Built for the city and its employers.
08:12Tue 1 Sep
Ateliers Verdier · Lyon Part-Dieu

Week 36

Ends Friday 18:00 · 184 players
ColleaguesDepartmentsSeason
    Log your Tuesday:
    48%
    of daily urban car trips in the EU are under 7 km. The commute is where most of them live.
    1.6
    people per car on average in Europe. Most seats on the road to work are empty.
    25%
    of EU transport CO₂ comes from urban travel, the only sector whose emissions rose since 1990.
    €180bn
    a year is what congestion costs the EU. Employers pay part of it in parking and lost time.

    Sources: European Court of Auditors SR 05/2026 · European Environment Agency · European Parliament · EU27 modal-shift study, 2026.

    The insight

    Nobody opens a carbon app on a Tuesday morning.

    Citymapper and Google Maps already plan the trip. A footprint number changes very little. What changes behaviour is a colleague who is twelve points ahead.

    What already exists

    Maps show the fastest way

    Every phone has a trip planner, and it optimises for time. Modal plans the commute and only the commute: every option with time, cost, CO₂, points and today's weather, carpool included. Then it records how you actually went.

    What we borrow

    The prediction-league playbook

    Mon Petit Prono made a nation of office workers check a leaderboard every matchday. Private leagues, weekly rounds, banter in the group chat. Matchdays happen once a week. Commutes happen every day.

    What is different

    Distributed by employers, not app stores

    The city does not need to win 100,000 downloads one by one. It needs thirty employers. Each one brings a site, a parking lot, a mobility plan it must negotiate by law, and a few hundred players.

    A carbon number is information. A colleague overtaking you on Thursday is a reason.
    Interactive · how the week works

    Play a demo week.

    Pick how you get to work each day. Points are relative to driving alone, so a 3 km commuter and a 30 km commuter compete on equal terms. The kilos of CO₂ are real.

    Your week
    0points
    Base points
    0
    Streak bonus
    +0
    Pledge bonus
    +0
    CO₂ avoided vs driving alone
    0 kg
    Same week, all year
    0 kg
      Points are relative

      Walk or cycle: 100. E-bike: 95. Bus, tram or metro: 80. Carpool: 50. Car alone: 0. A remote day counts 60, twice a week at most.

      Streaks and pledges

      Three low-carbon days in a row start a streak worth 10 a day. Hit the pledge you made on Sunday and take 50 more. Miss it and nothing happens.

      Every Monday is a reset

      Weekly rounds mean a newcomer can win week 37. The season table runs a quarter, and departments compete as teams so nobody plays alone.

      Fair by design

      Nobody is scored against a colleague's geography. If your only option is the car, carpool and remote days still score. Manual logging earns the same points.

      Interactive · detection

      The phone works it out. Then it forgets.

      Nothing runs in the background. You tap Record on the option you take, GPS is on for that trip only, and a small model on the phone recognises walking, cycling, bus, tram, metro or car. You tap Arrived, GPS is off. Raw location never leaves the device. Four fields do.

      Ready · Tuesday 08:02, home to office
      Walking Waiting Tram Cycling Car
      Stays on the phone
      • Location samples0
      • Motion samples0
      • Route match—
      • Home and office zonesfuzzed to 500 m
      • Deleted after upload—
      Sent to Modal
      date — mode — km — co2e_kg — coordinates · times · route · stops

      Wrong mode? Tap the trip and correct it. Corrections retrain the on-device model. They never unlock a map.

      Motion and speedAndroid Activity Recognition and iOS Core Motion give a first guess. Stop patterns and a match against the public transit network (GTFS) separate a tram from a car on the same street.
      Carpool proofBlaBlaCar Daily, Karos and other operators already certify commutes in the state carpool registry (Registre de preuve de covoiturage). Modal reads the proof, not the ride.
      Optional linksConnect a transit pass, a bike-share account or a cycling app to confirm a mode when the phone is unsure. Each link is a separate choice and can be undone.
      Privacy by design · RGPD

      Who sees what.

      The whole product is built around one sentence. There is nothing in Modal an employer could use to know where an employee went, and there is no way to obtain it.

      You see

      • Your trips, one line each: date, mode, distance, CO₂
      • Your points, streaks and rank
      • Your monthly attestation before it is sent
      • Everything stored about you, exportable in one tap

      Your employer sees

      • League tables: names and points, nothing else
      • Site totals for groups of ten or more people
      • Verified low-carbon days you chose to send, as a count
      • modes, distances, trips, addresses or hours

      Modal stores

      • Trip summaries for 13 months, then aggregates only
      • An account, a pseudonym if you want one
      • Hosted in the EU, encrypted at rest
      • coordinates, routes, or timestamps beyond the date
      Raw location never leaves the phone

      Mode recognition runs on the device. The server receives a date, a mode, a distance and a CO₂ figure. It cannot reconstruct a route because it never had one.

      GPS only when you tap Record

      The app never tracks in the background. The map on Home is for planning. You tap Record on the option you take, and Arrived when you get there. Inside the windows you set, Modal may send one reminder. Weekends are off. Holiday mode is one tap away.

      Your consent goes to Modal, not your employer

      Consent given to an employer is rarely free under RGPD because of the power imbalance. Modal is a third party running a voluntary game. Joining, leaving and switching to manual logging carry no consequence at work.

      Small groups are never reported

      Aggregates need at least ten people. A department of six shows up only inside a larger group, so a total can never point at one person.

      The attestation is a count you send

      To claim the forfait mobilités durables, you send a number of verified days per month. You see it first. The employer gets the count, and finally has proof instead of a signed promise.

      Launch is governed, not just installed

      Impact assessment (AIPD) before launch, works council (CSE) informed and consulted, a named DPO contact, 13-month retention, deletion within 30 days on request. No advertising. No data sales, ever.

      What happens when a manager asks for someone's trips?

      Nothing can be given, because nothing is there. The manager's dashboard is the same league table the employee sees, plus site totals over groups of ten. Modal's own database holds date, mode, distance and CO₂ per trip and no location. The design answers the request before it is made, which is what the CNIL means by privacy by design.

      Interactive · for employers

      What one site can move in a year.

      Slide the numbers for your site. The model uses ADEME emission factors and a conservative shift. It counts only commute days that actually change.

      Assumes 200 on-site days a year. Car alone 218 g/km, carpool 109, bus/tram/metro blended 45, e-bike 11, bike and walk 0 (ADEME Base Empreinte). Switched days split 40% transit, 30% bike, 30% carpool. Modal at €2 per active player per month.

      0t CO₂e a year
      avoided on the commute, scope 3 category 7
      0car days
      removed from the road each year
      0spaces
      fewer cars on the lot on an average day
      €0a year
      for Modal, or €0 per tonne before parking and FMD savings
      Commute days on this site, by mode
      Today
      Season 1
      Car alone Carpool Transit Bike Walk
      A legal obligation, made easy

      Since the LOM law, companies with 50 or more staff on a site must negotiate home-to-work travel every year, or write a mobility plan. Modal is the plan, with numbers.

      Scope 3 measured, not surveyed

      Commuting is category 7 of the CSRD and BEGES inventories. Most firms estimate it from a survey. Modal reports it from verified trips, aggregated by site.

      The forfait mobilités durables, finally verifiable

      Employers can pay up to €600 a year tax-free for cycling and carpooling (€900 with a transit pass). Today they rely on a signed promise. Modal sends a verified count.

      Parking, brand and the Monday mood

      A freed parking space is a recurring saving. A league in the group chat is the kind of thing people mention when they describe where they work.

      For the city

      The city gets its four outcomes. Employers do the distribution.

      The metropolis wanted a citizen platform. A commute league sold to employers delivers the same four value drivers, faster and cheaper, because it recruits by the hundred.

      Ridership and farebox

      Shifted commutes fill seats already paid for

      Every commute moved from car to tram is a paying passenger on a line that runs anyway. The league targets the 3 to 7 km trips where transit already wins on time.

      Costs avoided

      Less congestion at the hours that matter

      Commutes are the peak. Removing car days at 8:15 and 17:45 is worth more than removing them at noon, and that is exactly when Modal counts.

      Mobility data for planning

      Aggregated flows by employment zone, never by person

      With employer opt-in, the city receives mode shares and distance bands per site, over groups of ten or more. Enough to plan a bike lane. Not enough to find anyone.

      Citizen buy-in

      A daily service people like builds trust for the rest

      Low-emission zones are easier to accept from a city whose league you played in. Modal is co-branded with the metropolis and the city's own staff play first.

      The first 100,000 players

      The case asks how a city reaches 100,000 users and at what cost. Not through app-store ads at €3 to €5 per install that churn in a week. Through payroll.

      1. PilotThe metropolis, the city hall and the university hospital play first. Public employers, public proof.12,000
      2. Season 1The mobility-plan associations of two business districts bring 25 employers into an inter-company league.45,000
      3. Season 2The city co-funds half of year one for any employer on its territory. Cost to the city: about €12 per player.100,000
      Launch plan and pricing

      Three seasons to a city-wide league.

      Each season adds a layer. The game first, the money second, the city league third. Nothing ships before the impact assessment and the works councils have signed off.

      1. Q4 2026
        Pilot, three public employers

        On-device detection, weekly rounds, department teams. AIPD completed, CSE consulted, manual mode live from day one. Success metric: 30% of staff still playing in week 10.

      2. Q1 2027
        Season 1, the money layer

        Verified attestation for the forfait mobilités durables, carpool proof from the state registry, scope 3 category 7 export for the annual report.

      3. Q2 2027
        Season 2, the city league

        Inter-company league across business districts, city co-funding, aggregated planning data for the metropolis with employer opt-in.

      4. Q3 2027
        Season 3, the coach

        A personal suggestion once a week at most: the one tram that fits your usual 8:10 departure, or the colleague two streets away who drives the same way. Frugal AI, no feed, no noise.

      Pricing
      €2per active player, per month
      • Billed on players who logged a trip that month, not on headcount
      • City co-funds 50% of year one for employers on its territory
      • Free for the metropolis's own agencies during the pilot
      • No per-seat minimum, cancel at the end of any season