Rapid Route Planning with Podaris: A Landmark Shuttle Bus Service for Gloucestershire

When it comes to public transport planning, time can be of the essence. Using the Podaris platform, Beate Kubitz Associates (BKA) planned and registered a first-of-its-kind shuttle bus service on behalf of Gloucestershire Community Rail Partnership (GCRP), all in only two weeks from submission to acceptance.

The pilot scheme, based in Gloucestershire, a predominately rural English county, linked the communities of Cam, Dursley, and Slimbridge, as well as giving residents and visitors enhanced connectivity to the popular Slimbridge Wetland Centre.

BKA were provided access to Gloucestershire County Council's dedicated Podaris enterprise instance, where they leveraged a suite of innovative multimodal planning and analysis tools to perform route planning and accessibility analysis in a fraction of the time taken by previous methods. With these tools they were able to inform reliable, data-informed decisions-making for GCRP.

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Why was Podaris used to plan the shuttle service?

BKA required a tool that could perform bus route analysis for a new community bus service, to rapidly and accurately ensure robust connectivity with the local railway station, and optimum accessibility for residents. Using Podaris, the BKA team was able to plan, analyse, and deliver actionable outputs for GCRP, all while allowing stakeholders to comment and provide feedback on different scenarios,accelerating viability assessments for various proposals.

Antony de Heveningham from BKA explains the usefulness of Podaris in exploring routing options that maximise multimodal connectivity:

"Being able to narrow down those options and come up with a focused idea of what the service should be at a really early stage was really helpful. Having those outputs from Podaris and being able to sense check our ideas really quickly and simply helped massively"

How did Beate Kubitz Associates create and register the service in only two weeks?

To ensure the new service could meet the needs of everyone, BKA leveraged Podaris' powerful yet easy-to-use isochrone analysis tools to measure the accessibility of the proposed service, with particular attention paid to elderly users, individuals with children, and those with limited mobility. By examining the walkability around each stop and using demographic data to visualise accessibility, Podaris provided the outputs needed by GCC to quickly yet effectively judge route viability.

Efficiency

With Podaris, the planning process was dramatically accelerated, saving BKA valuable days by avoiding the technical complexities often encountered with traditional GIS tools. Anthony continues,

"It saved us a couple of days in time and reduced the project budget by several hundred pounds. With traditional GIS tools creating transport scenarios can take a long, long time and getting outputs from them can be really time consuming. With Podaris, in terms of useability and flexibility, I was able to really quickly and easily check routes and look for service clashes."

BKA praised Podaris' one-click analysis applications as a significant cost and time-saving upgrade, while appreciating its interoperability with traditional GIS tools. "It was really easy to tweak and create multiple variations of a route to see what would or wouldn't work in terms of the community".

Productivity Boost

BKA were able to use Podaris' stop management system (which integrates with national stop ID and information, like NaPTAN) to eliminate the time-consuming task of locating each stop individually and helping BKA match stop codes more efficiently.

With Podaris, the process of importing GTFS feeds and creating multimodal services also became vastly more streamlined, as Podaris uses the underlying street network to automatically create paths between the stops as they are placed on your map. Scrutinising networks became equally straightforward with a host of tools for route analysis, which enabled BKA to easily check if other routes were already using a bus station proposed as part of the route, so as to avoid clashes.

Impact

Podaris' platform proved an invaluable time-saving tool. By streamlining their route planning process, Podaris replaced BKA's piecemeal solution of standalone GIS software and plugins, with an efficient, data-driven, cloud-based solution. The result? A landmark service launched by GCRP in only two weeks, unlocking improved rail to leisure connectivity and community connections for residents and visitors in the Slimbridge area.