Put service design in the passengers' hands

At a town council meeting recently a member of the public stood up to complain that the recent changes in the local bus timetable had unforeseen consequences for many townspeople as they could no longer make a connection with another service (and other operator) that they regularly used to.

The particular details don't really matter as it is very common that a change in service to benefit passengers in one area will usually be to the detriment of others elsewhere. It is the simple domino effect of shifting resources.

Since the deregulation of the bus companies in 1985 it seems the decisions by operators are only driven by the bottom line instead of passenger need. Ensuring that their profits go up or that their costs go down or they gain some form of advantage for themselves as a commercial enterprise is naturally their duty to their shareholders.

What's missing from the process of consulting the public about service design in public transport is any capacity in the users and their elected officials to design services for themselves or even understand the implications. Just to appreciate the impact of the complaint, a unpaid councillor spent several hours plotting impentrable timetables into spreadsheets and it was still far from clear as to what a solution might be.

What passengers and communities need is free access to a software application that displays all the current bus, train and other public transport schedules and actual ground-covered routes in a given area on a map to visualise service and modal connections. On this they could enter proposed timetables and route variations so service alterations can be modelled and compared.

This shouldn't be hard to realise. Timetables are widely published and the GPS coordinates of bus stops and train stations are freely available. Features such as factoring-in vehicle slowing from peak passenger loading, vehicle speed, basic revenue and cost calculations should also be included.

A simulation engine would then move the vehicles around the map according to the timetables so that the different connections and modes could be visualised.

Then there might be happy discoveries that several buses cross paths on a rural road which ought to have a shelter placed there so it could become an interchange. It would also show that a Suffolk village only has 4 buses a week whereas a much smaller one has 25 buses a day running through it empty because of their fortunate position in-between service hubs and not because of demand.

But most importantly such a tool would then allow communities to design services for themselves or at least engage in a dialogue with operators armed with sufficient information to fully understand the impact of service proposals and changes.

A tool with these kinds of capabilities could answer the many 'what if' questions in public transport route planning that - because of complexity - is in the UK determined by commercial operators and by tendering for route subsidy common in rural areas. Communities would be able to visualise and cost local public transport provision for themselves and so enabled to lobby for services and amendments and analyse solutions such as community transport and DRT with data from this modelling. The capability to 'predict and provide' and consider service innovations will not be just in the hands of private operators but will also be where it belongs; with the users.

Then rather than pitting every village, town and parish against each other for a better service from the network provider through political patronage, transport planning can be made collaborative; as each stakeholder in a route will be able to work together and see how services to meet their needs would impact others and so more efficiently and fairly distribute the limited resources to statutory, commercial and charitable transport operators.

A contributor to a recent House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee report on transport and accessibility to public services said:

"Too many authorities choose to ‘do things’ to communities rather than spend the time finding out what they actually need and want first ... local people should be correctly liaised with prior to any changes being made, it is them that have to live with any consequences and they should be listened to correctly about how they will be impacted but also so they properly shape services..."

There are already demonstrations of live time-table simulation on the web. Here is a visualisation of the trains running from Norwich.

There is an open-source platform for train timetabling and planning called Open Track which can produce train schedule graphs from text timetables.

Software maker Zircon takes these train graphs a step further with a tool for visualising timetable conflicts in 3D. Their website has a video demo.

Train Graph

I will prevail on university transport departments in the UK and USA to give me any pointers to existing software or encourage them to undertake developing this as a project. I hope someone reading this one day will understand the problem and so be interested and will get in touch. 

nat (at) pixlink.co.uk