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

  • Rethink required to reduce road transport’s environmental impact
    March 15, 2016
    Against a background of a renewed focus on limiting the rise in average temperatures, Colin Sowman looks at a project that is taking a holistic approach to the environmental impact and safety of road transport. At the COP21 meeting in Paris last December, almost 200 nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to keep the rise in global temperatures to 2°C) compared with pre-industrial levels. The transportation sector is a major contributor to the production of CO2, one of the main green
    Read More
  • Enforcement needs automation and communication
    February 1, 2012
    TISPOL's Peter van de Beek questions whether the thought processes which drive enforcement technology development are always the right ones. Peter van de Beek sees an ever-greater role for technology in traffic enforcement but is concerned that the emphasis of technological development and discussion is not always in the right places. 'Old-fashioned' face-to-face policing remains as valid as it ever did, he feels, but adds that there should be greater communication with those engaged at the sharp end of saf
    Read More
  • Swarco: ‘Everyone’s running after buzzwords’
    April 1, 2019
    The ITS world finds itself in a time of great change. Swarco’s Michael Schuch talks to Adam Hill about connectivity, the increasing importance of the end user – and why you shouldn’t leave your core business behind
    Read More
  • Gearing up for IntelliDrive cooperative traffic management
    February 1, 2012
    Beginning in the first quarter of 2010 it became evident that the IntelliDrivesm programme direction had been reestablished, by the USDOT's ITS Joint Program Office (JPO), after being adrift for a few years. The programme was now moving toward a deployment future and with a much broader stakeholder involvement than it had exhibited previously. By today not only is it evident that the programme was reestablished with a renewed emphasis on deployment, it is also apparent that it is moving along at a faster pa
    Read More

Highlighted Content