DRT Service Improvement

Overview

• Fleet size: 6
• Service Hours: 7am - 7pm Weekdays, 8am - 6pm Saturday
• Cashless payments
• App & Call Centre bookings

North Lincolnshire Council wished to replace their previous dial-a-ride service around Scunthorpe and the region with a technology enabled on-demand service. Launched in September 2020, the service operates as a multi-zonal service extending the capture range of existing commercial public transport routes.

The Problem

North Lincolnshire is an extremely large zone for an on-demand service, covering 876 sq. kilometres in a rural low-density setting. Looking at nine recent projects in Finland, Germany, UK, France, Canada and the United States—on average these DRT services covered less than 85 sq. kilometres per zone. This makes the JustGo North Lincs DRT service zone 10 times larger.

In a competitive process Liftango provided detailed analysis of the existing dial-a-ride service and desired zone of operations.

Results of the simulation showed that Liftango was able to provide East Yorkshire Motor Services (EYMS) with the most efficient manner of delivering the DRT service, while meeting the customer service requirements of North Lincolnshire Council.

EYMS leveraged Liftango’s experience in marketing and deploying DRT services, such that the service was oversubscribed 400% above capacity in the first week, and repeat bookings were made up to four weeks in advance in order to secure trips.

In addition to the technology, Liftango also provided detailed data reporting and analysis service, which guided stakeholders in suggesting and implementing improvements to the service to result in more patronage and reduce operational cost metrics.

The Solution

• Large zone demand balancing
• Complex multi-zone service rules
• Wallet payments integration feature
• Flexible shift break locations

The Results

(during COVID-19 restrictions)

• 2000+ trips booked in the first month of operation
• >97% on-time or early running
• 17% repeat users
• 80 most completed trips in a single day

Learnings

Being a sparsely populated and large geographical service area requires a precise orchestration of fleet movements across a multi-zone service area. With vehicle capacity restricted due to COVID-19 social distancing protocols, ongoing collaboration between Liftango and EYMS ensures that routing and matching of vehicles to passengers is continually optimised. This has provided an improved passenger experience amidst an oversubscribed and capacity-restricted period.