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Case Study: Traveline ScotlandAutomating Public Transport Information “I have been using your journey planner over the last few weeks and found it an invaluable tool. My most recent journey was today to a town I had never been in and the directions I was given took me straight to the door of the house I had to visit. Many thanks.” - A. Stevenson, a satisfied Traveline customer. SnapshotType of Operation: Multimodal Business ProblemTraveline Scotland is a partnership between Transport Operators, Local Authorities and Transport Scotland whose aim is to provide up to date accurate, impartial and understandable information on all Public Transport services within Scotland and from Scotland to major destinations in other parts of the U.K. Servicing a population of more than five million people, Traveline Scotland’s challenge is to bring together more than 23 sources of transport data from 500 operators supplied in six different formats. Ensuring accurate quality journey planning information on both its Web site and in its call centre is an absolute priority, but the complexity and volume of the data was an immense challenge. A lack of good quality data was also an issue and not all the data formats supported the ATCO-CIF format and would need to be converted. SolutionIn June 2005 Traveline Scotland selected Trapeze Group to implement an online journey planner as well as a call centre enquiry management system. A great deal of data work was done to improve data quality; this included a start on data ownership and expansion of some data to include additional stops. Trapeze Group was quickly able to identify wrongly located stops and those errors in data were passed back to data owners to be fixed at source. Data owners commented that this sort of information and feedback had never been received before and was a very In order to provide comprehensive door-to-door journey planning, Trapeze Group developed data converters so that non supported ATCO-CIF formats could be translated. This would enable accurate journey planning information to be provided on a weekly basis. Initial training for the call centre team leaders began two months before launch. Supported by Trapeze Group trainers they cascaded the training down, helped by a series of ‘countdown to launch’ to build excitement and momentum. In January 2006, the call centre and online journey planner went live. ResultsThe Enquiry Management System is providing the Traveline Scotland call centre with fast accurate responses to multi modal enquiries such as journeys that include bus, rail, coach and walk legs. Agents can select points of origin and destination by pointing and clicking at the map, or by typing in a bus stop, or premises, or address, or postcode, or business name. The online journey planner has also been well received. User friendly and intuitive, the Traveline Scotland Web site guides inexperienced users easily through their options, ensuring that they can plan their journeys when they want. Response from travellers confirms these results. A recent user of the system remarked: “I have been using your journey planner over the last few weeks and found it an invaluable tool. My most recent journey was today to a town I had never been in and the directions I was given took me straight to the door of the house I had to visit. Many thanks.” - A. Stevenson What's NextTo further improve available public transport information, Traveline Scotland is now considering the benefits of Trapeze Group’s Batch Journey Planner, an application that uses the Journey Planning Engine to plan multiple journeys to or from a particular location. Personalised journey plans can be automatically produced by the system to be printed and mailed, or sent electronically.
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