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

  • Strike action prompts commuters to try something different
    June 2, 2014
    David Crawford highlights responses to transit disruption on both sides of the Atlantic. Shortly before workers at San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) began a lengthy round of pay and conditions-related strikes in summer 2013, impacting on the daily lives of 400,000 communities, online ridesharing group Avego publicised a new web address: bartstrike.com. By the start of the following week, Avego was encouraging stranded commuters to download its smartphone app by offering them the chance in a raffle
  • WiM avoids bumps in the road
    May 5, 2020
    Road surfaces are deteriorating as years of budget squeezes bite among local authorities. Adam Hill asks leading Weigh in Motion players what effect this might be having on the accuracy of their technology – and how authorities can be made to see that WiM is a helpful tool
  • Willers offers community mobility service 
    February 7, 2022
    30-day subscription costs ¥5,000 (Japan) and S$75 (Singapore)
  • Overcoming the toll fatigue paradox
    July 17, 2025
    Why does the most transparent funding mechanism – the simplest, clearest and most intuitively logical – face the strongest public resistance? Tim McGuckin ponders the reasons…