Skip to main content

Bedford utilises Qroutes software to boost transport efficiency

Bedford Borough Council has used Qroutes' route planning software to reorganise the home to school transport network. The solution Is said to have saved over £200,000 ($140,000) a year in transport costs and has helped plan transport for 3,000 school children. Additionally, Bedford has used the cloud-based service to plan transport 700 special educational needs and 1000 social care users. The council manages a fleet of approximately 50 in-house vehicles which mainly transport the most vulnerable people.
April 16, 2018 Read time: 2 mins

Bedford Borough Council has used 8661 Qroutes' route planning software to reorganise the home to school transport network. The solution Is said to have saved over £200,000 ($140,000) a year in transport costs and has helped plan transport for 3,000 school children.

Additionally, Bedford has used the cloud-based service to plan transport 700 special educational needs and 1000 social care users. The council manages a fleet of approximately 50 in-house vehicles which mainly transport the most vulnerable people.

The product is also said to have helped the council remove eight buses from the network through improved vehicle utilisation.

Chris Pettifer, chief officer for transport, Bedford Borough Council, said: “With council budget restrictions and policy changes we knew we had to review the council’s client transport network significantly. We needed software that could support this process of the best routes and vehicle suitability in view of all the complexities of school, special needs and social care transport. Over the years we have tried different systems but none really delivered what we needed and were also costly. Qroutes has conversely been fantastic in providing an easy to use interface that cannot only re-plan our network in minutes but was also available as an affordable solution over the web.”

“It used to take days or weeks to re-plan routes, but with Qroutes we can run a new plan for 3,000 school bus children literally in minutes. We manually intervene sometimes as some individual requirements can be very unusual, but the system saves a lot of time and we can run different ‘what if’ scenarios to work out the best options”, added Pettifer.

Qroutes is available as a Software as a Service subscription. Subscribers have access to new functionality as releases come online, without having to update versions locally.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • South west’s first smart motorway opens
    January 15, 2014
    The first smart motorway scheme in the UK’s south west has been officially launched, covering seven miles of motorway around the Almondsbury interchange and including junctions 19-20 on the M4 and junctions 15-17 on the M5. It is designed to help reduce congestion and improve safety and journey times by introducing variable speed limits and opening the hard shoulder during busy traffic periods. The improvements to the M4 and M5 use a range of technologies and operational systems to reduce congestion and
  • change in the US transportation sector
    February 1, 2012
    Transportation for America's James Corless talks about the changes needed in the US's transportation policy. Anew report, 'Smart Mobility for a 21st Century America', highlights how improving efficiency through technology is critical as the US's population grows and ages, budgets tighten and consumer preferences shift.
  • change in the US transportation sector
    February 6, 2012
    Transportation for America's James Corless talks about the changes needed in the US's transportation policy. Anew report, 'Smart Mobility for a 21st Century America', highlights how improving efficiency through technology is critical as the US's population grows and ages, budgets tighten and consumer preferences shift.
  • EVs: Time for a rethink
    December 14, 2021
    Given a growing body of evidence that EVs are not the clean, green machines they are made out to be, Andrew Bunn suggests they can only be part of the puzzle – not the answer to environmental problems