Location intelligence: how smart thinking has kept West Midlands transport on the rails
Key workers' reliance on public transport meant it was vital to keep it running throughout the pandemic - despite national attempts to scale back
The sudden shock of coronavirus sent public transport use plummeting in 2020. The number of journeys fell by more than two-thirds, and distance travelled was down as much as 80 per cent for some forms of transport. Even by the end of 2021, bus, coach and train use was still only back to around two-thirds of what it was before the first lockdown.
In the West Midlands, passenger numbers declined by 90 per cent in early 2020, and yet Transport for West Midlands (TfWM, the public body responsible for co-ordinating transport services in the region, similar to Transport for London) still had to keep services running efficiently and safely - for healthcare staff and other key workers, among others. Key to this was the organisation's ongoing partnership with geographic software provider Esri.
"We've been working with Esri at Transport for West Midlands for the best part of, I think, about four and a half years," Data Innovation Lead Stuart Lester said when we spoke last year.
"That partnership has grown fairly organically... There's a number of capital-funded projects that we're involved with that we now partner with Esri on, which has led to the enterprise license agreement with them and access to Esri's professional services staff supporting our events control management centre, which is called the Regional Transport Coordination Centre."
Keeping the Midlands moving
At the height of the pandemic, Esri and TfWM worked on location intelligence and mapping technology, analysing data collected to find the areas of high density where key workers were the most dependent on public transport to get to work.
"We utilised some of the Esri tools to undertake some surveys that we pushed out to the NHS trusts and the various other medical workers across the region...which included the numbers of employees working at certain locations, and - where people were happy to share information - we could get an idea of some of the[ir] postcode... And then we've got some historical information as well that came in from the likes of the Census and previous travel surveys we'd undertaken.
"We were able to fuse the data together to give us an idea of the key bus routes and the key use of the metro... which actually runs through areas that traditionally have more blue-collar workers. Therefore, actually, that correlates with a number of people who work in hospitals etc as well, so the metro was able to support them.
"Finally, just prior to lockdown, we had taken ownership of the Ring and Ride service, so that was repurposed to help specific groups of people get to either the bigger hospitals or, should it have been needed, the Nightingale centres that were set up in the West Midlands."
TfWM fed its data into Esri's tools for analytics and mapping, which is key to deriving value. "It wasn't just traditional thematic mapping with something saying ‘there's a high density of people here'," Lester adds. "We were combining the types of [job] roles with the propensity to use public transport."
He continues, "That information allowed us to best use our resources to focus on certain areas. We didn't have to look across all 12,000 bus stops to work out which ones were most well utilised, or across the - I think we've got 900 bus routes - which ones are the ones we need to focus on, etc. Some of that is known anecdotally, but some things weren't picked up until we got the data.
"A good example is shift workers and the times that they would congregate around certain areas: so the likes of Jaguar Land Rover and the way that people get to those big factories according to their shifts. That's the sort of data that wasn't always available to us or immediately obvious [pre-pandemic], where some of those problems may occur. We were able to go back to those companies and say 'This is an issue that could happen outside your factory or your place of work, let's work together to give the right messaging and make sure that people are safe and able to use public transport safely.'"
As a result of the work, TfWM was able to repurpose the Ring & Ride service to help key workers, change timetables to reflect the availability of staff, and put forward evidence for additional funding from the Department for Transport (DfT). In addition, the data it collected and collated, especially around key worker use of these services, was key to demonstrating that it should maintain public transport service levels despite the pandemic, rather than following the DfT's proposed massive scale-back to save money.
Strength in sharing
It's truism in the corporate world that when you've worked on something, someone else will suddenly realise its value. Such was the case for TfWM, which quickly found other organisations, departments and even the general public expressing an interest in the data it had put together.
Key stakeholders including the Mayor's office, the police, Network Rail, Highways England and the Department for Transport were all interested in using TfWM's data, threatening to massively increase the amount of time the team spent simply answering queries.
Rather than handling each request individually, TfWM built an online dashboard to store and visualise the data and analytics. Lester freely admits that the team's skillset is not in building websites, so he utilised Esri's staff and tools, though the enterprise licence agreement, to stand the websites up quickly.
Although the data was initially fairly limited, "people were looking at it daily" to see how vehicle use was changing in the pandemic. After that, interest shifted to tracking the increase in walking and cycling, and then - "as the impact of Covid was starting to be felt" - to viewing how key workers were travelling to NHS hospitals.
The return to school in September 2020 prompted another surge in use:
"My team and Esri's consultants were able to analyse the locations of where there could be more impact, both on the transport network and in the public realm where people collect around bus stations, etc, as schools go back and in line with social distancing capacity problems; both in the public realm and on the transport infrastructure itself."
People have got access to the data at their fingertips
Putting data in the public realm has removed a huge burden from Lester's team.
"We're now at the point where I think it's become a business-as-usual thing. We don't get as many questions, because people have got access to the data at their fingertips. We've improved in terms of the volume and the amount of data that we have, and the comparative factors as well. So, we're able to monitor the current ‘recovery'...in light of what's happened over the course of the last year and also with data that happened pre-Covid, so we can compare it."
Tying it all together
The work isn't finished yet. Much of TfWM function is around events management: making sure transport is able to handle extra stresses around big events in the region. That includes Coventry City of Culture, running from 2021 - 2025, and the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham this summer.
The amount of data humans produce is growing exponentially every year, and those who can understand and use it quickly are the most likely to enjoy success. Sensibly, then, TfWM's next steps revolve around real-time information management; specifically, focusing on upcoming technologies like 5G networks and connected and autonomous vehicles. Lester says TfWM aims to become "the centre" for both of those technologies in the region.
But information sharing, which has brought so many benefits in the last two years, will remain a priority. The pandemic was hard on transport operators, but it did have one unexpected positive outcome for TfWM and Esri. Chris Barber, Head of Transport and Infrastructure at Esri UK, says:
"Culturally, it seemed that the pandemic removed typical traditional cultural barriers that might be there - and that really made this work a success."