Public transportation: present vs future
Public transportation can be a blessing or a mess. It all depends on the planning and bus capacity. Just compare. You want to go from A to B in the middle of the day. You enter the bus and you are truly amazed. The bus is really big and almost empty. Your travel is quite comfortable, but is it profitable for the city to allocate this bus for the line?
You stand at the bus stop, surrounded by a group of teenagers going to school. You remember the times when the crowd was much smaller, but it changed a few years ago. With new blocks built nearby and both young couples and young families moving in, you could expect that. But the bus that arrives is not any bigger. Its size is what it used to be and you really struggle to even enter it.
Someone would say - the public transport authority should do something about that. They are right. However, strategic planning and purchases take time. That’s why it was a pure pleasure to work with an institution that understands it and decides to plan ahead. Thanks to cooperation with Zugerland Verkehrsbetriebe and Canton of Zug, Datali ensured that their bus fleet would be appropriate for future needs.
Traffic prediction for growing cities
The project started with defining a set of questions that our partners wanted to answer.
They knew that buying new buses was quite an expense. So they wanted the purchase to perfectly fit their future needs.
Managing the bus fleet is not only about now. It’s about the present and future, also including preparing and planning. This includes looking at current passenger occupancy for every bus line and its parts. Then it was time to predict population growth, spatial development of the region. With that, they could focus on simulating changes in traffic and answer the final questions. What kind of buses would they need in the future? What kind of purchases do they need to make now?
From data to a traffic-analytics tool
Datali’s work began with the team preparing and cleaning the traffic data. As experts in data analytics and data visualization, we were able to successfully face several challenges and deliver a game-changing tool for future planning.
The challenges we tackled were quite diverse. How do we present multidimensional data, like bus line, time, line direction and number of passengers on visualisations? How to ensure it’s both informative and easy to understand? This is just the tip of the iceberg- the list goes on and on.
Additionally, our tool provides a look into the present, as well as in the future. The result? Users can choose a bus line, the direction and the time range. The generated visualization helps to show both passenger traffic and the percentage of bus filling. Taking this into account was crucial. You can easily imagine that observing 1302 passengers doesn’t say much. To drive any conclusion, one needs to consider it in the context of bus capacity.
Take a look at the visualization, and focus on a heatmap for a little. The scale highlights the busiest segments on the bus line. With a click on a given part, you can see the bus load or the passengers’ number. Secondly, we focused on including the predicted population growth in the area. With that, we forecasted future passenger traffic.
The user can also include various types of buses. Wonder what will happen if you decide to run a minibus on the given line? No problem.
Want to make smarter decisions?
Our work helped Zugerland Verkehrsbetriebe and Canton of Zug to make the right strategic purchases. The tool allowed them to invest in buses that perfectly matched both present and future needs, ensuring cost efficiency and improved service for passengers. No spending money on buses that won’t be needed in the end.
Similar solutions are perfectly applicable for any scenario that includes fleet management.
Optimizing current fleet allocation?
Predicting future demands on specific routes?
This is just around the corner.
