Wednesday 17 February 2016

Is 'transport on demand' the future for rural public transport?

 
Rural bus services are under threat.  Increasingly we hear of local authorities threatening drastic reductions or even complete removal of their budgets for supporting unprofitable bus services, with the risk that communities may be cut off from the public transport network.
 
Understandably, those affected protest against such cuts, for fear of being isolated and unable to access essential services for education, health, shopping, work or the simple independence of being able to get out and about without having to drive a car or rely on a lift.
 
They are joined in their protests by observers with an interest in good public transport, who bemoan the loss of any service, every cut in public expenditure on buses, as a threat to the future of the industry.
 
But is a reliance on heavily subsidised but often lightly used fixed route bus services, really the best way forward for public transport in deep rural areas?  Or is there an alternative solution that couples the imagination of operators with emerging technology to provide a more flexible, agile solution with commercial potential?


 
Whatever one may feel about the rights and wrongs, it is clear that most public authorities are facing massive pressure on their spending and are having to hunt in the deepest, darkest corners of their budgets to find more and more drastic savings.  As discretionary items, bus services are a soft target.  While many authorities have tried to stave off drastic cuts in their transport expenditure for as long as possible, the fact that such large proportions of their budget can't be touched by law means that they can no longer avoid taking the axe to their supported bus networks.  
 
There's no sign that the pressure for savings will relent any time soon, and when it does, it's hard to imagine that the first priority will be to restore the many hundreds of bus services that will have been lost.  After all, even if a future Chancellor of the Exchequer does find a few billions stuffed in shoeboxes under the bed in number 11, understaffed transport departments up and down the country will find themselves jostling with health, education and other worthy causes to have their begging bowls filled.
 
They will know that many habitual users of rural public transport will have been forced into finding new ways of travelling - or even forced into moving house completely - and won't come back overnight.  All other things being equal, the rural bus network of the future may well cost a lot more than it does today to deliver the same outcomes.
 
But every problem creates an opportunity, and here is a chance for the privatised bus industry to find a new solution to old problems, and develop a new form of commercial business in areas where none has previously existed.
 
While I'm a child of deregulation and will happily wax lyrical about the many achievements of the privatised bus industry in a deregulated environment, I don't think our industry is completely without its faults.  One of those - in my humble opinion - has been too much of a tendency to hold our hands out for public money when it has been an easy alternative to getting off our backsides and seeking commercial opportunities.
 
For evidence of this, one need look no further than the number of hitherto subsidised journeys - especially evenings and Sundays - on otherwise core commercial routes around the country that have magically been declared to be commercially viable, the moment the local authorities have raised the prospect of having to turn off the subsidy tap.
 
Admittedly rural bus services are a more difficult challenge.  The vast distances to be travelled, serving small settlements characterised by high car ownership, create an unhappy relationship between costs and revenue.  Many operators have been clever in scheduling vehicles, using school and college movements to cross-subsidise off peak shopping trips, but even this is not enough to keep many fixed routes afloat in outlying areas.
 
Part of the problem here is that in many people's eyes, rural public transport means a conventional bus, and bus operators are an easy target.  I was listening to a radio programme just the other day in which a village resident described his highly customised daily travel routine - a bespoke series of journeys heading in all directions from his place of residence - and then laid into his local bus providers for failing to anticipate all these widely varying needs and provide his tiny community with a network of services of an intensity that would make even Transport for London's finest planners wince, all on the off chance that he might occasionally need them.
 
It was rather as if he was suggesting that because he occasionally buys shoes, his village must have a shoe shop, and then of course a clothes store for all his fashion requirements.  And perhaps a book store where he can browse the latest titles.  And obviously a furniture warehouse for when his sofa needs replacing, and no doubt all while preserving the essential tranquillity of the rural setting that attracted him to live there in the first place.
 
Of course that's an exaggeration, but while it might sound absurd, the retail sector values his business and has found ways of providing him with the services he needs without having to build an unlimited range of shops in his village.  They simply provide their service when he needs it.  Whether it be home delivery or click and collect, retailers have harnessed the power of the internet to ensure that all their potential customers - no matter how near or far from their nearest store - can enjoy their full range of products whenever they need them.  Perhaps it's time for us to do the same.
 
"Transport on Demand" (ToD) has been a concept that has been around as long as I can remember.  Traditionally it has described dial-a-ride and community transport services, specifically targeted at those unable to use more conventional transport modes.  But of course the most obvious form of ToD is a taxi, and the emergence of smartphones and their associated app technology has given birth to a range of taxi-like services for a modern generation in the form of Uber, LyftBla Bla Car and numerous others.
 
To some extent these compete with more traditional transport modes, to some extent they complement them.  But they have their disadvantages, and one of these is that they are not widely available in large swathes of rural Britain.
 
My own experience of ToD is limited - most of my career has been involved with planning fixed line scheduled bus routes.  But a few months running a Cango contract for Hampshire County Council in 2013, coupled with a good understanding of the power of the internet to link vehicles with riders, gives me reason to believe that there is something worth playing for.
 
Cango was a name for a small network of routes in rural Hampshire that had replaced previous fixed route services that had proved too expensive for the authority to subsidise.  Hampshire bought a small fleet of minibuses, painted them yellow, fitted them with hardware that would provide a data link to a call centre at County Hall in Winchester and then hired the vehicles to the winning tenderers to operate the routes.
 
The principle was that rather than having large vehicles driving round the countryside on very low frequency fixed routes, on complicated service patterns that might only serve particular communities on odd days of the week, the Cango bus would set off from point A and head to point B via the most direct route, veering off only to serve those places where a customer had booked their travel with the call centre the day before.
 
The vehicles were fitted with screens which gave the driver a list of required calling points and estimated times, uploaded from the call centre around five minutes before departure, and the driver would plan his or her route to serve the places listed.  Walk-up customers could appear without pre-booking and use the bus as a conventional service from A to B, paying a normal bus fare, but couldn't take advantage of the demand responsive facilities.
 
At Velvet, we operated Cango route C41 for around three months in early 2013 following the demise of Countryliner, using a small Solo that proved to be nippy and reliable, albeit with tatty bodywork comprising more filler than structure - perhaps a reflection of the standards of the previous operator - and which did little for the image of the service.
 
In the case of route C41, the A was Alresford and the B was Basingstoke, and apart from a short section of fixed route at each end, the route had licence to wander across a scattered network of country lanes and tiny hamlets, as the map and timetable shows:
 
The spine of the route was the B3046 through the Candovers, but the route could go anywhere in the circled area if required.  The picture at the top of this article shows the bus in Upper Wield, taken while I was waiting for a booked passenger (she arrived on time, I was there early)!
This is the actual timetable that accompanied the registration, showing the need only to provide times at the terminal points.  Everything else was left to chance!
 
As the timetable shows, the service provided a range of off-peak shopping and leisure journeys and a limited commuter service, with the bus also being used on a local 'closed door' school journey to Preston Candover School to get the best possible utilisation of the asset.  I'll come back to some of the shortcomings of the timetable in a moment, but either way it was a higher level of service than many of the communities could have expected to have enjoyed were they to rely on a fixed route bus service. 
 
Prior to taking on this contract, I had no desire to get involved in demand responsive transport.  I saw us at Velvet as being red-meat-eating, self-assured providers of 'proper' bus services.  Ambling round the countryside picking people up at their gates was for our (very much admired!) community transport friends.  I imagined the users would all be elderly and/or infirm - a very valuable market in itself - but that the service would be a complete irrelevance to the younger, perhaps more demanding customers that public transport also needs to attract if it is to have a healthy future.
 
I actually resisted the award of the contract to start with, arguing to Hampshire that they must have someone else willing to give it a go.  But either they didn't or they were particularly determined to give it to me, so eventually I relented and I'm glad I did, because the experience of operating it was a revelation and completely changed my views - to the point where I was absolutely gutted when we lost it to Stagecoach on retendering a few months later, as I had big plans for it!
 
The thing that really challenged my preconceptions and gave me massive food for thought was the fact that the service was actually used by a complete cross section of society.  Whereas I had imagined that the vagaries of the timetable and the need to pick up an actual telephone to book in advance would put off most self-respecting adults, and have the kids running to their parents for a lift, on the few occasions I drove the route I found myself carrying teenagers going out to meet their mates, families off for the day together, full fare paying adults heading out to the shops or home from work, as well as of course a decent proportion of concessionary pass holders for whom the service genuinely was a lifeline.
 
Of course most users seemed to be regulars, and their pick-up points were very specific and they were well trained to be out there a few minutes in advance so that the driver would spot them (even if I did have to drive through Preston Candover three times on one occasion looking for my passenger, who haughtily informed me that the regular driver parked outside his house and tooted!).  But I did manage to encounter a few who were even less experienced than me, first time users who had found the booking process straightforward and transparent and looked forward to making more use of the service.
 
Mixing it with the big boys in Basingstoke Bus Station
 
 
This particular story doesn't have a happy ending.  Cango was notorious within the public transport community in Hampshire for its very high subsidy per passenger journey - partly a product of a labour-intensive telephone based infrastructure and the need for bespoke technology in the vehicles.  The network has been gradually trimmed back and now even the Alresford - Basingstoke route has reverted to a fixed line of route, no longer demand responsive.  While the timetable hasn't changed very much, the loss of the "on demand" element will have deprived many users of any access to public transport.
 
But my experience of running the service convinced me that the model has great potential.  The key point is that it was valued and used by a complete cross section of the market.  Let's accept for a moment that the problem with Cango was that usage was too low and subsidy too high, but now start to imagine what would have happened if we could have ironed out a few points that, in my view, were holding it back:
 
  • Branding:  While Hampshire are to be commended for the bright, attractive branding and for not falling into the trap of many community transport services of making their buses look like patient transport vehicles, it still looked like a 'niche' service - not part of the normal public transport network - whereas in my view if it was seen more as a part of the bus network potential users would have come to it more naturally
  • Timetable:  This is specific to this example of course, but the timetable could easily have incorporated a morning commuter journey into Basingstoke to balance the evening return - instantly increasing its appeal.  Also, the off-peak timetable 'faced' the wrong way, with Basingstoke having the less attractive off-peak service despite having a much stronger shopping offer
  • Route:  Because of Hampshire's legitimate desire not to be seen to be interfering with the commercial bus network, walk-up customers could only travel from one terminus to the other, and local journeys could not be made on the fixed route section at each end.  If the route had been available to casual users between Old Alresford and Alresford at one end, Cliddesden and Basingstoke at the other, the available market would have grown significantly
  • Stops:  Customers travelling from the 'on demand' section had to travel either elsewhere within the 'on demand' section or all the way to the terminus.  They couldn't get on or off halfway along the road into Basingstoke for example, limiting the appeal for some users.
  • Fares:  The fares were too cheap.  This is very typical of a local authority led service trying to be as inclusive as possible, but a hard nosed commercial operator would have provided a more sophisticated ticket range with offers applicable to different groups of users, including making those who would be willing to pay more, pay more!
  • Booking:  All the publicity said that intending customers had to book by 5pm the day before travel, rendering the service useless for the vast number of travel demands which are spontaneous.  In actual fact, the call centre would quite happily take booking until 10 minutes before departure - as long as it was in enough time to get the information on to the driver's screen 5 minutes before the off.  Many regular users knew this and most bookings were made on the day of travel, strictly against the rules.  Had the publicity reflected what was actually available, how many more people would have been attracted to it?
  • Vehicle:  The bus looked battered and was tatty and dirty inside.  Despite our best efforts, we couldn't justify major expenditure when we only had the contract for a few months.  Numerous users commented about the unattractive vehicle.  A more attractive, clean, modern vehicle featuring wifi and charging points for example would greatly enhance the appeal 
  • Technology:  This is probably the key factor.  The service was founded on technology which is now effectively obsolete, requiring a telephone call centre to handle bookings and bespoke hardware and software to enable the data link.  Partly the costs were driven up by the local authority's legitimate need to be seen to be as inclusive as possible.  Imagine what happens to the costs if the journeys could be planned using modern 'off the shelf' technology, including standard issue tablets for drivers rather than bespoke display screens, and if the vast majority of bookings were through the internet and didn't require any human intervention at all.
Would sorting out all these issues be enough to have got the subsidy per passenger down to an acceptable level, or even made the service commercially viable?  Well I can't answer that for sure.  What I do know is that technology has moved on in leaps and bounds since Cango was in its heyday, and to be blunt, a commercial provider would probably take a more disciplined approach to revenue generation and cost control.
 
Some of the issues I've listed are of course specific to the route in question, but I would argue that the principles would apply equally well on any route anywhere in the country, where there is a route between two significant traffic objectives with a dispersed rural hinterland in between.  In simple terms, it's easy to condemn traditional demand responsive services as being too expensive without exploring the reasons why and how these could be mitigated.
 
The key point is that the exercise proved to me that people of all walks of life and all sections of the community are ready and willing to use Transport on Demand, and if this willingness, coupled with cost of modern technology, provides a more cost-effective model for serving scattered rural communities than lugging big empty buses round the countryside on fixed schedules that serve a small number of people very well, but don't serve a much larger group of people at all, it's surely a concept worth exploring?
     
     


5 comments:

  1. A very interesting article, but I am drawn to the sentence "While I'm a child of deregulation and will happily wax lyrical about the many achievements of the privatised bus industry in a deregulated environment, I don't think our industry is completely without its faults".
    I am not sure what these achievements are but I believe deregulation to be responsible for the situation today that Phil describes.
    I still look on deregulation as a opportunity to ride away with the profits and dump the loss makers on the taxpayer.
    My local bus route operated services up to around midnight and there is no doubt that these late night services would not cover their costs.
    However later information showed that overall the route operated at quite a good profit.
    On deregulation the last service became 17.45 which was no use to me and so I, and many others, were forced into getting a car - hence Phil's remark of high car ownership.
    Once into a car it is very hard to leave it behind and it only the older non car owners that need to be catered for.
    As the years progress I believe due to the normal run of life even the demand response services will not be needed as young people get a car at the earliest opportunity.

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  2. I've always felt there are many more opportunities for transport on demand, but often such schemes lack the flair or initiative of some commercial networks. I also feel there is more scope for integrating such schemes with other local services and create partnership workings with a more holistic approach.

    Back in the early 2000's, I was managing what was then the country's first food bank project, based in Salisbury. The project was attracting s lot of funding and regional interest and we were pursuing funding streams to launch a delivery service for emergency food boxes into rural Wiltshire.

    Thinking back to the days when Tilling and then NBC carried parcels and newspapers, I approached the then manager of Wiltshire County Council's Wigglybus scheme to see if he would be interested in some partnership working. Their buses would deliver emergency food boxes to a collection point like a local shop, post office or GP surgery and the customer would collect them by bus. Or even the bus deliver them to the customer if they lived on the line of route. We in turn would pay a small amount for any such box delivered and would publicise their scheme.

    The gentleman concerned was very interested and it led to a meeting with a half day out on their buses. Sadly the scheme never got off the drawing board as I moved on to pastures new before it got off the drawing board.

    In my current role inspecting GP services, I have seen some brilliant working between bus operators and GP practices. Particularly where there is an elderly rural population and services have been reduced to a handful a day.

    Clinics and even individual patient appointments have been timed around the local bus to ensure the patient can receive health care and get home without an expensive taxi journey. The services publicise each ither's offerings and in one case I saw, the GP practice would even book their oatient's journey with the operator.

    I'm sure there is scope for much more creative thinking in this area to help ensure the sustainability of such bus services by recognising they do not operate in isolation. Passengers go somewhere for a purpose, so find out what that purpose is and work with it!

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    1. Excuse my typos! I really should roof pread....!

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  3. Non-commercial services are at a real risk at this moment, not least in Derbyshire. Purely by an accident of geography I have a good, largely commercial hourly (occasionally better) service to Ashbourne and Derby, but nearby villages of a similar size, such as Hulland Ward and Parwich, face being cut off entirely as Derbyshire scrap their subsidised bus budget. Whilst there is an argument that if these areas don't sustain a commercial service then it won't affect that many, those that rely on these services for their independance and well being won't see it that way.

    The removal of these services will likely see the end of these bus services for a significant time to come. Yes, these are not densely populated areas but people don't use the bus because they are used to using other forms of transport. Those that do support rural bus services will be forced to change travel habits and should the bus return, there will be nobody there to use it.

    I dare say that procurement rules have been to the detriment of rural bus services for some time now. If a council says that they want you to run this timetable with these fares then operators are competing on price. They'll try to run the services for as little as possible. That means that the subsidised servives being provided across the country are often of a poor standard. There's no ambition for growth and no incentive for investment.

    Again using Derbyshire as an example, this often leads to the operators running the commercial services and the operators running the subsidised services being different. This means that there is very little innovation taking place.

    The majority of commercial services in the County run into big towns, such as Derby, Chesterfield or Manchester. That's not a coincidence, it's because that's where a lot of people want to go. Young people want to go to these big centres for leisure, adults for work and all groups for shopping.

    In contrast, very few subsidised services go near these centres. That's probably because to do so would involve competing to some extent with a commercial service. But if commercial operators were to work together with local authorities then there's a chance that better services could be created which could reduce the burden on the authority.

    Take the 140 group of services around Crich. Crich, Lea and Holloway are fairly big communities, not to mention the tramway museum drawing in a lot of people. Yet the services run to Matlock and Alfreton. They have no bus service to Derby.

    An example of this in practice is my local route, Swift. Formerly the seperate commercial Derby to Ashbourne and subsidised Ashbourne to Uttoxeter services. With the same number of buses and same number of drivers the two were merged and the subsidised part went from being a bus vaguely ever two hours to an hourly service as well as connections to Derby.

    You've obviously got far better information than me on this Phil, but from my casual observations, there seem to be a lot more people using the subsidised part of the service, including a fair few travelling from one end to the other. That's despite there being a much faster train from Uttoxeter to Derby.

    So maybe there is scope for reform and review. If the subsidies are withdrawn, it will be interesting to see what services remain and which dissapear. I suspect that some will suddenly become commercially viable, some operators will put everything they've got into keeping their current services going, there will hopefully be some innovation, but it is inevitable that some, if not most, stand no chance at all.

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    1. I am a total novice so please do correct me with any knowledge others have, also from Derbyshire and very worried about the recent meeting by the council re bus subsidies.

      Looks like the proposal on the table is for the council to cut all bus subsidies by 2018 but there will be up to 10 demand responsive services to replace them at a higher cost per passenger ratio.

      I am not mr shoe buyer as quoted above but even I can see better options if the subsidised routes were allowed to compete, thus ultimately being less of a drain on the tax payer as they become more profitable.

      ...by the way another good post Phil

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